SYNOPSIS

The view of women in Islam has long been a hot topic, but even more so due to the amount of attention Islam has received in the press lately. Even with all of the media coverage, the actual theological doctrine on women has hardly been addressed. There are troubling passages concerning women in the Qur’an and in the collections of hadith that have seen little criticism in the public square. In 2010, I debated a Muslim woman in a mosque in Toronto, Ontario, during which I brought to light many of the difficult and demeaning passages about women in the Qur’an, and defended the high level of respect for women in the Bible. Islam teaches that men are created superior to women, which is why they must discipline women. Women are a majority in hell due in part to the deficiency of their intellect. Wives are to satisfy the sexual desires of their husband when and how he chooses or they displease Allah and are cursed by the angels. Muhammad married a young girl and consummated that marriage when she was nine. These aspects of Islamic theology create an environment of male veneration and female degradation. Conversely, in Christianity, women are the first to find the empty tomb and proclaim the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the foundational doctrine of our faith. Even this one feature of the gospel story creates a profound difference between women in Islam and women in Christianity.

A couple of my friends recently traveled to Europe for their honeymoon. While in England, they noticed posters, banners, and advertisements all over London for the “Inspired by Muhammad” campaign.¹ One poster that caught their eye was a picture of a female Muslim barrister with the quote, “I believe in women’s rights. So did Muhammad.” Another campaign advertisement on the side of a taxicab read, “The rights of women are sacred.” So it seems the campaign is promoting positive imagery concerning the view of women in Islam.

Why the positive image campaign? The American Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) 20/20 program attempted to shed some light on the Islamic view of women through an episode entitled, “Islam: Questions and Answers” in October of 2010. However, not much light was shed on the actual theology of Islam as based in the texts. Let’s look at a few basic teachings from the Qur’an and from the most trusted collections of hadith² to understand the Islamic teaching on women and contrast that view with Christianity.

 ALLAH CREATED MEN AS SUPERIOR

There are two passages in particular that reveal the woman’s status in comparison to a man’s status in the Qur’an. The first is Surah (chapter) 2:228, which reads, “And women shall have rights similar to the rights against them, according to what is equitable; but men have a degree (of advantage) over them.”³ This passage is referent to divorce rights and begins by saying that men and women have similar rights, but the rights are not the same: men have a degree over women’s rights. Why are men said to have a degree over women in this passage? Perhaps the second passage from the Qur’an will help explain.

In Surah 4:34, Allah revealed to the prophet, “Men are in charge of women, because Allah hath made the one of them to excel the other.”⁴ The reason men must take care of women is because men have been made superior to women. Ibn Kathir, the most respected Muslim commentator on the Qur’an, explains this passage in his tafsir (commentary): “Because Allah has made one of them to excel the other,’ meaning because men excel over women and are better than them for certain tasks. This is why prophethood was exclusive to men, as well as other important positions of leadership. The Prophet said, ‘People who appoint a woman to be their leader will never achieve success.’ Al-Bukhari recorded this Hadith. Such is the case with appointing women as judges or on other positions of leadership.”⁵ The explanation is clear here: men are superior to women and that’s the way Allah has made them. Yet, if there remains doubt, the verse from Surah 4:34 says, “So good women are the obedient, guarding in secret that which Allah hath guarded. As for those from whom ye fear rebellion, admonish them and banish them to beds apart, and scourge them.” The man is to discipline the woman from whom he fears rebellion. A list of disciplinary actions given by Allah to Muhammad is to be enacted by the man if he fears her disobedience (admonish, banish, scourge). The philosophical rendering of these verses is that women are made inferior to men by Allah, so it is the man’s responsibility to discipline her, even to the point of “scourging” or “beating” her.

In February of 2010, I debated Tabasum Hussain, a Muslim woman, on this topic of the views of women in the Qur’an and the Bible. The debate was held in a mosque in Toronto, Ontario, with an overflow crowd. About eighty-five percent of the audience was Muslim. By the “question and answer” time, there were more questions than I could answer in the time allotted. A few Muslim gentlemen approached me afterward and one asked, “If the view of women in the Qur’an was given by God, then that view, whether or not it lined up with the Christian view of women, would just be the way it is, right? I mean if it’s true, then it’s true.” Notice this Muslim man’s honesty with me. He’s not trying to make Islam more appealing to the Western ear, such as seen in the “Inspired by Muhammad” campaign. He says if it is true, then that’s just the way it is. So what else does Muhammad’s revelation teach about women?

 A WOMAN’S INTELLECT AND AFTERLIFE

Muhammad explained written contracts for a fixed debt in Surah 2 of the Qur’an. In teaching how Allah wanted contracts witnessed, Muhammad said, “And call to witness, from among your men, two witnesses. And if two men be not (at hand) then a man and two women, of such as ye approve as witnesses, so that if the one erreth (through forgetfulness) the other will remember” (Surah 2:282). There must be two women to witness if there is not one man available, because of the forgetfulness of women.

Something must be amiss in a woman’s mind if she is prone to forgetfulness, and Muhammad explained the problem in Sahih Muslim 142. He had a vision of hell and saw that a majority of the inhabitants were women. A woman asked him why women were the majority in hell. He replied, “I have seen none lacking in common sense and failing in religion but (at the same time) robbing the wisdom of the wise, besides you.” On hearing this, the woman asked what was wrong with the common sense of women. Muhammad answered, “Your lack of common sense (can be well judged from the fact) that the evidence of two women is equal to one man, that is a proof of the lack of common sense.”⁶ While the statement is notably circular in reasoning, it is also demonstrative of Muhammad’s view of the intellect of women: they lack common sense. This saying about the female intellect comes from two of the most trusted hadith collections: Sahih Muslim and Sahih al-Bukhari. Consequently, it can be firmly established that Muhammad teaches that women have a deficient intellect.

 THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN: PHYSICAL ABUSE

In the debate, I argued Surah 4:34 as a problematic verse for the view of women in Islam. Eight of ten translations of the Arabic term, idreb, have been translated “beat” or “scourge.” Should men fear rebellion from women, they are to beat the women as part of disciplinary action. Notice, according to Surah 4:34, the woman does not actually have to do anything wrong; the man must only fear her rebellion. Muslims may argue, however, that Surah 4:34 refers only to a light tap, not intended to harm the woman. In Sahih Muslim, Aisha (Muhammad’s favorite wife) reported that Muhammad struck her in such a way that caused her pain,⁷ and she seemed scornful of the disciplinary practice. In Sahih al-Bukhari 5825, Aisha states, “I have not seen any woman suffering as much as the believing women. Look! Her skin is greener (bruised) than her clothes.”⁸ During the debate, Dr. Hussain responded that the woman who was beaten in the Bukhari passage was a liar and therefore deserving of the punishment. This is a major difference between the view of women in Christianity and Islam. There are no texts in which Jesus affirms a woman should be beaten for lying, nor for other sins.

A second possible Muslim rebuttal on the issue of beating is from the collection of hadith, Sunan Abu Dawud. There is a passage in Sunan Abu Dawud 2141, in which Muhammad said, “Do not beat Allah’s handmaidens.” While this is a correctly quoted part of the hadith, the fuller context gives a much different picture. Immediately following this quote, the passage reads, “but when Umar came to the Apostle of Allah and said: Women have become emboldened towards their husbands, he (the Prophet) gave permission to beat them.” To confirm further the authority of a husband in the question of wife-beating, Muhammad states in the next hadith, 2142, that “a man will not be asked as to why he beat his wife.” Muhammad’s interpretation of Surah 4:34 leaves no question that, in Islam, a woman can be beaten by her husband with the blessing of the prophet himself.⁹ The importance of utilizing the hadith for interpreting the Qur’anic passage cannot be stressed enough here. Rather than relying on my own interpretation of Surah 4:34, I have Muhammad’s interpretation from the collected sayings in the hadith.

 THE OPPRESSION OF WOMEN: SEXUAL CONTROL

In ABC’s 20/20 program entitled, “Islam: Questions and Answers,” host Diane Sawyer attempted to answer the question of whether men control women in Islam. However, she never investigated the more explicit passages of the Qur’an with regard to women as sexual objects. In Surah 2:223, Muhammad revealed, “Your wives are as a tilth [a field to be plowed] unto you; so approach your tilth when or how ye will.” At first glance, this passage may not seem substantial, but Muhammad’s explanation of this verse in the hadith establishes the basis for a man’s control over the wife’s sexual intimacy. Muhammad, commenting on 2:223, states, “By Him in Whose Hand is my life, when a man calls his wife to his bed, and she does not respond, the One Who is in the heaven is displeased with her until he (her husband) is pleased with her.”¹⁰ Furthermore, the angels curse her until dawn.¹¹ Allah is displeased with a woman until she sexually satisfies her husband when and how he wants. What are the implications of such a teaching? It can be deduced from these passages that a man’s sexual gratification is directly related to a woman’s reward of heaven or punishment of hell. According to At-Tirmidhi, “If a woman dies while her husband was pleased with her, she will enter paradise.”¹² This teaching elevates her sexuality to one of the most important determining factors of her eternal salvation, and establishes the judgment as directly tied to the will of the husband.

Still, a more problematic teaching, and one that is not scrutinized deeply enough in the public square, is Muhammad’s marriage to Aisha. When Muhammad married Aisha, he was in his fifties, but Aisha was six years old. Sahih Bukhari reports when the consummation of their marriage occurred: “The Prophet wrote the marriage contract with her when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old.”¹³ How can a girl be expected freely to choose marriage at the age of six and consummation of the marriage at the age of nine? She cannot be expected to understand marriage at this young age and, therefore, she lacks a real choice in either matter—another means of controlling female sexuality. Furthermore, when asked by Aisha, Muhammad made it clear how a Muslim man could know that he has a virgin girl’s consent for a marriage: “Her consent is (expressed by) her silence.”¹⁴

Is the Veil a Choice? Is the veil of a Muslim woman simply a choice that she makes or is the veil a divine command? In listening to interviews in the U.S. media, one would lean toward a reply of “choice,” but the Qur’an and the hadith tell a different story. In Surah 33:59, God commands, “O Prophet! Tell thy wives and daughters, and the believing women, that they should cast their outer garments over their persons (when abroad): that is most convenient, that they should be known (as such) and not molested.” God commanded the prophet Muhammad to cover his wives, daughters, and the Muslim women. The reasoning for why the women are to be covered: so as not to be molested. Other translations use the words hurt, offended, insulted, given trouble, and annoyed in place of molested. This is a very different picture of the veil than ABC’s depiction of wearing it as a personal choice purely for modesty or piety. According to the passage, if a woman does not veil, she can expect some kind of trouble from men.

Another passage from the Qur’an, Surah 24:31, specifies that women should “lower their gaze and guard their modesty; that they should not display their beauty and ornaments except what (must ordinarily) appear thereof; that they should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their beauty” except in the presence of certain family members, slaves, male servants free of physical needs, or small children who have no sense of the shame of sex. In combining the two passages, the purpose, method, and command to veil becomes more understandable. Women are to cover their bodies in the presence of those who may be sexually attracted to them and “molest” or “annoy” them. Furthermore, Muhammad ordered the veiling of his own wives and distinguished his wives from his lady-slaves specifically by veiling.¹⁵ According to Sahih Bukhari, one of Muhammad’s wives, Safiyya, was “ordered to use a veil.”¹⁶ So, if a Muslim woman is going to follow the teaching and example of Muhammad, she must veil. There is no real choice for women offered in the texts of Islam.

After reviewing the actual texts and interpretations on these issues, women seem to be much more controlled by men in Islam than ABC’s 20/20 program and the positive image campaigns portray. The ultimate reality in Islam is that women are a majority in hell because of their many problems, including their ungratefulness to the husbands.¹⁷ Any Muslim woman stating that she has control over her life and equality with Muslim men must at least reconcile the passages covered in this article with her view of Islam.

 The Christian View: Willing to Die For

At the beginning of my debate, I presented the view of women according to the Bible. I selected three areas: (1) the woman in creation, (2) the woman in this life, (3) the woman in the afterlife. In this article I will briefly address the first two areas. Also, recognizing that Christians debate over views of biblical womanhood, I kept my presentation to those issues that directly contrasted the Islamic texts with the biblical, emphasizing the importance of the role of women in the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith: resurrection.

Women in Creation. In the Genesis creation account, God created both male and female in His likeness (1:27). Both mankind and womankind are recipients of God’s image, meaning that Eve was given the same essential characteristics in her human nature as Adam. The creation account demonstrates an equality in human nature that is absent from the Islamic accounts.

After God made man and woman, He commanded Adam and Eve to subdue and rule the earth. Notice that the wording is directed toward both Adam and Eve. “And God blessed them. And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth’” (Gen. 1:28 ESV). Consequently, in her creation, the woman was meant to share the responsibility of a co-ruler, along with her husband Adam. At this point, God saw what He had made and declared that it was very good (Gen. 1:31). Eve was a part of this very good creation of God.

Woman’s creation from the rib of man is not negatively portrayed in the biblical texts, though a Muslim may describe it as such. In the Genesis 2 account the man is supposed to leave his father and mother, “hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.” The indication of this passage from the grammatical structure is that a man will leave his parents and unite with his wife as a direct result of her creation out of him (Gen. 2:24 ESV). In addition, woman is regarded as man’s own flesh, his own body. Paul affirmed the unity as one flesh when he wrote to the church in Ephesus that “husbands should love their wives as their own bodies…for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it” (Eph. 5:28–29 ESV). So woman is one with man; he is to treat her as he treats himself. In Islam, woman is in need of discipline by the man; he is to treat her much differently than himself.

Women in This Life. The godly woman in the biblical texts is a capable, trustworthy person. As a wife, Proverbs 31 states an excellent woman is more precious than rubies. She is a hard worker who also provides for her family and makes important financial decisions. She is wise and teaches kindness to others. There is strength in her arms and she is clothed with strength and dignity. The woman is to be praised because she is a blessing.

Furthermore, the apostle Paul describes women as persons for whom men must be willing to die. In Ephesians 5:25–26, he commands, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her” (ESV). How did Christ love the church? He was willing to be crucified for her! In loving a woman as Christ loved the church, the Christian man should be ready to suffer for her, even to the point of death.

Finally, women in all four Gospel accounts were the first people to witness the empty tomb and the resurrected Lord. They were also the first to testify publicly to the resurrection of Jesus. The Christian God gave women the honor and responsibility of testifying to the foundational doctrine of the Christian faith before anyone else. If I took this one feature of women in the Christian faith alone and compared it to all the positive verses related to women in the Qur’an, the difference in level of respect would be astounding. In Christianity, God entrusted women to testify aptly to His most important salvific act in human history. In Islam, women are a majority in hell for the intellectual deficiency inherent in their created nature. These are clearly two very different views on women in two very different religions.

Mary Jo Sharp is the founder of Confident Christianity Apologetics Ministry and a graduate of Biola University. She participates in public, formal debates on Islam and appears on the Aramaic Broadcasting Network show, Jesus or Muhammad, engaging in live debate with callers from around the world.

NOTES

1. “Inspired by Muhammad” website. Available at http://www.inspiredbymuhammad.com/womens_rights.php#profile.
2. Hadith are the narrations concerning the words and deeds of the prophet Muhammad. They were collected in the eighth and ninth centuries and are considered important tools for understanding the Qur’an.
3. All Qur’an quotations are from the Yusuf Ali translation unless otherwise noted.
4. The Qur’an. Mohammad Pickthall translation.
5. Hafiz Ibn Kathir, Tafsir Ibn Kathir, trans. Shaykh Safiur-Rahman Al-Mubarakpuri, vol. 2 (Houston: Darussalam Publishers, 2000), 442.
6. Sahih Muslim 142, trans. Abdul Hamid Siddiqi, vol. 1 (Lahore: Ashraf Printing Press, 1976), 47–48.
7. Sahih Muslim, no. 2127.
8. Sahih Bukhari, trans. Dr. Muhammad Muhsin Khan, vol. 7 (Riyadh: Darussalam, 1997).
9. The argument among Islamic scholars is usually centered on what kind of beating, not whether to beat.
10. Sahih Muslim, no. 3366.
11. Ibid., no. 3368.
12. Jami At-Tirmidhi, trans. Abu Khaliyl (Houston: Dar-us-Salam Publications, 2007).
13. Sahih Bukhari, no. 5133.
14. Ibid., 5136–37.
15. Sahih al-Bukhari, no. 4213, 5085. Muhammad had sexual relationships with his female slaves, so this is an important distinction of a Muslim wife.
16. Ibid., no. 4212.
17. “Ungrateful to Their Spouses,” Sahih Muslim, no. 142.

Sikhism has approximately 25 million followers worldwide, 16 million who reside in the state of Punjab (which straddles Northern India and Pakistan), where the religion originated nearly 500 years ago. Guru Nanak, the founder of Sikhism, was born into Hinduism and familiar with Islam, but disillusioned with both. He nonetheless included some writings of Hindu saints and Muslim mystics in the Sikh holy book, the Guru Granth Sahib. According to Sikh tradition, Guru Nanak received special revelation from God asking him to preach the tenets of Sikhism to all religions. Despite the opposition of the Muslim rulers who reigned in India at that time, Sikhism grew under the succeeding gurus. Sikhs place a great deal of importance in the gurus and the Guru Granth Sahib for spiritual guidance.

The Sikh worldview rejects some elements of the Hindu worldview, such as polytheism and the caste system, but accepts others, such as karma and reincarnation. Salvation, or liberation from the cycle of rebirth, requires being obedient to the teaching of the gurus, and leads to a union with the Ultimate Reality in Sikhism. The Christian response should show familiarity with the Sikh view and focus on the true nature of the God of the Bible and His offer of grace through salvation in Christ.

July 11, 2004, Rajinder Singh Khalsa and his brother were in front of their family’s restaurant when they were confronted by five angry men. “Give me that dirty curtain,” one of them shouted. Khalsa tried to tell them that it was a turban, not a curtain. “Go back to your country,” shouted another man. “But we are American, where should we go? We are not Iranian. We are not Muslim. We are Sikhs from India,” replied Khalsa. “Then go back to India,” he shot back. At this point verbal abuse became physical violence and the men began beating Khalsa’s brother before turning on him, pummeling him in the face repeatedly. When the whirlwind settled, Khalsa lie unconscious on the sidewalk, his turban, ripped from his bloodied head, trampled underfoot. No one in the crowd who had gathered across the street to watch attempted to intervene.

Valarie Kaur, a third‐generation Sikh American, grew up in Clovis, California, where her family had farmed land since the early 1900s when her grandfather came from India by steamship. In the days after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, grief gave way to fear, and fear regressed to violence against anyone who “looked” Arabic. “Sikhs who wore turbans became immediate targets,” Kaur told the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL. “Temples were burned, homes vandalized, people threatened, shot, stabbed.”

The attack against Khalsa and his brother was another in an unpredictable pattern of violence spreading across America. On September 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh man, was gardening outside his Mesa, Arizona home when he was shot and killed by a man who called himself a patriot. It was the first of 19 “retribution” murders that would follow in the aftermath of 9/11. These stories traveled by word‐ofmouth to the far reaches of her California farming town, compelling Kaur, who was a Stanford University student at the time, to set off across the United States in a Honda Civic with her cousin to document the madness on film.

“Nearly every person you see in America who wears a turban is a Sikh,” Kaur said. “We heard stories from Muslims, Arabs, and even Latinos who were placed in the ‘Muslim‐looking’ category, until at one point the camera turned 180 degrees on us and people started yelling at us, telling us to go back to our country.” They suddenly realized they were caught up in the whirlwind, too. The difference was that they had a camera to capture the moment.¹

VALUING THE BETTERMENT OF HUMANITY

Most Americans who come across a turbaned Sikh man are unfamiliar with his beliefs and culture. Informed Americans assume Sikhs to be of Indian origin, but Sikhs themselves would say they are “Punjabi,” from the thriving agricultural state known as Punjab in Northern India, bordering Pakistan.²

A minority Indian religion, there are about 25 million Sikhs globally, 16 million of which make their home in the Punjab. Sikhs began migrating to the West Coast of the United States and to Canada in the early 1900s and started their lives in North America mainly as farm workers who would eventually become farm owners. Today, there are around half a million Sikh followers in the United States, professionals who work in diverse fields such as higher education, medicine, and the high‐tech industry, or who own farms (especially in California) or small businesses. It is not uncommon to see a gurdwara, or Sikh temple, in major cities throughout the United States and Canada.

Sikhs represent less than two percent of the total population of India. They are present in most cities in the country, however, and are prominent in the military, the government, the transportation industry, and in almost all spheres of Indian life.

The current Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh, an Oxford‐educated economist and a Sikh, spoke recently about his faith, affirming its relevance today: “The value system, as set out in the Guru Granth Sahib, should be the basis of evolving a worldview aimed at the overall betterment of humanity.”³Sikhism, insists Singh, is the fountainhead of wisdom and its contents are as relevant today as they were 400 years ago.

Pride in Sikh identity is strong not only among Sikhs in India, but also among Sikhs who are dispersed across the globe. The struggle for this identity goes back a long way, and can be traced to the tendency for many in India to perceive Sikhism as a form of Hinduism:

The boundaries between Sikhism and Hinduism were never sharply drawn until very recent times, and in the Punjab it was not uncommon, until the violent secessionist movement of the 1980s began to alter the landscape, for a Hindu family to raise one of their children as a Sikh. Sikhs who have abandoned the most overt marks of their faith, such as unshorn hair, can scarcely be distinguished from the Hindus, and it is not in the least incorrect to suggest that the wrath of orthodox Sikhs are directed as much at moderate Sikhs as at Hindus.⁴

Many Sikhs in Punjab sought autonomy and independence from India in the 1980s and ’90s, in the creation of a state called Khalistan. The Khalistan movement resulted in intense violence and governmental human rights abuses against Sikhs. This period in their history caused Sikhs to distrust the Hindus, who dominated the Indian political and social scene, even further. The violence began in 1984 when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian army into the most holy of Sikh sites in Punjab, the Golden Temple, to flush out militant Sikhs who had taken up arms to defend their sacred ground. The bloody confrontation continued beyond the Golden Temple as anti‐Sikh massacres in response to Sikh protest and rioting consumed India’s capital, resulting in the deaths of nearly 3,000 innocent Sikhs. As part of the cycle of violence and retaliations, Indira Gandhi was assassinated shortly thereafter by two of her own Sikh bodyguards.

REVERENCING LIONS AND DAUGHTERS OF KINGS

Sikhism began about 500 years ago with the teachings of its founder Guru Nanak (1469–1539). Nanak was born in a high caste Hindu family but grew weary of the corruption and abuse of the caste system by the Brahmins, those in the highest caste, and of the brash militancy of Muslim rulers during this period. As a young man disillusioned with both Islam and Hinduism, Nanak, according to Sikh tradition, received a divine calling to initiate a new faith. “Nanak experienced the ultimate reality as without form and transcendent, above all things. He did not actually see the ultimate reality in any concrete form. He heard the divine words, the cup of nectar appeared before him, and he drank from it.…thus began the Sikh religion.”⁵

Despite periods of great persecution by Muslim rulers in India, Sikhism grew steadily and nine other gurus followed Nanak (see table 1), culminating in the tenth guru, Gobind Singh (1675–1708). Today, thousands of sayings, hymns, songs, verses, and poetry from the Sikh gurus and from Hindu saints and Muslim mystics (Sufis) compose the most holy book of Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib (the Book of the Gurus), which is displayed at the center of every Sikh gurdwara in India and abroad.

The Guru Granth Sahib is perceived as the continuation of the legacy of the living guru lineage. In fact, when the tenth guru of the Sikhs, Guru Gobind Singh, died, he ceased the practice of the appointing of the next guru; instead he pointed his followers to the Guru Granth Sahib as their spiritual and religious guide. The reverence accorded to the most holy book of the Sikhs is evidenced by rituals that are strictly observed in any given gurdwara around the world.

Guru Gobind Singh formed Sikhs into a spiritual sister‐ and brotherhood known as the Khalsa (Punjabi for “Pure Ones”) around the year 1699. Its purpose was to seal Sikh identity among Sikhs in the face of severe oppression from Muslim rulers.

The first five members of Khalsa were given the last name Singh, which means “lion.” The last name Singh today is almost universal for Sikh males. Sikh women have the common last name of Kaur, which means “daughter of kings.” Rather than choosing the family names that might represent caste or class, “Singh” and “Kaur” demonstrate a sense of equality in contrast with the Hindu method of naming children.

Five articles of faith were instituted to identify the five Sikhs who were initiated into the Khalsa. These symbols are commonly known as the “Five Ks” (short for the five kakaars) and are observed by Sikh men and women who take amrit, the Sikh baptism:⁶(1) Kesh: unshorn hair and beard; (2) Kangha: a comb for self‐sufficiency; (3) Kara: a steel bracelet for strength; (4) Kaccha: undergarments for military readiness; and (5) Kirpan: a ceremonial dagger that represents the commitment to stand up and fight injustice.

HELPING TO CHOOSE WHOSE PATH TO FOLLOW

The Sikh culture is an example of solidarity par excellence. This group of people, through its family life, honest living, and community sharing, has been able to unite to assist each other and to remain, through the years of its comparatively young history on the stage of world religions, unmoved by all the attempts of its enemies to force a Sikh diaspora.

Consider, for example, the institution of Langar (Guru’s free kitchen), which was started by the first guru in the sixteenth century and strengthened by the later gurus. The rules of Langar require that all, whether high or low, rich or poor, should sit in the same row and partake of the same food without anydiscrimination, a practice viewed as adversarial to the Hindu system of caste division. Even Emperor Akbar, ruler of the Mughal Empire of India from 1556 to 1606, had to sit and dine with common people before he could see the guru.

Some may be just cultural Sikhs or secular Sikhs, but most have a degree of familiarity or conversance with their religion. The majority of first‐generation Sikh Americans, regardless of their sacred or secular persuasion, grant that preservation of their unique heritage is priority one.

IDENTIFYING THE IDENTITY CRISIS

There is, however, often a big gulf between Sikh immigrants who arrived in the United States in the 1950s and ’60s and Sikh immigrants who arrived only recently. There is disparity not only in social and economic spheres (many recent immigrants are highly trained professionals), but also in the degree of allegiance to Sikh traditions and faith. North American–born Sikhs are struggling to preserve their identity. Newly immigrated Sikhs are striving to succeed in their new homeland, and seeking to fit in often at the expense of rejecting their Sikh identity.

Having a basic understanding of the nature of Sikhism before launching into a conversation on Christian faith is best. Discovering also what an individual Sikh believes may provide a sense of where he or she is coming from. Asking questions may help to demonstrate a genuine interest in the person. Acknowledging the reverence and devotion the Sikh follower has for his or her religion and realizing that Sikhs, like other South Asians, are relational and community oriented above all else, are also important (see sidebar for an example of these concepts).

Sikh families view conversion to any other faith as a rejection of the community they so deeply value, and will shun the family member who converts. Theological discussions alone are not sufficient in the communication of the gospel to Sikhs. Traditional apologetics should be preceded by “cultural interaction, relationship building and a long term commitment.”⁷ Mikel Neumann describes these three elements as prerequisites to incarnational ministry, which goes beyond cognitive communication.

Despite adoption of a few religious concepts and a great deal of sayings of Hindu and Muslim saints in the Guru Granth Sahib, Sikhs are very aware, and proud, of their own theological distinctiveness. In India, or wherever they are in the world, there are efforts to retain this unique identity. Sikh writings attribute the following saying to Guru Nanak as he was about to discover the new faith: “There is no Hindu, there is no Muslim, so whose path shall I follow? I shall follow the path of God.”⁸

Sikhs believe that if one is born into the Sikh faith, then that is what one should follow to achieve salvation. They also believe that Christians, Hindus, and Muslims likewise should seek God in their own realm of faith, since, in their view, there are many paths to the divine.

BUILDING A FOUNDATION

“The Guru is Himself the Transcendent Lord, the Supreme God, Saith Nanak: meditate thou on that Guru.”—Guru Granth Sahib⁹

How should Christians approach Sikhism? In order to witness effectively to Sikhs, Christians first need to comprehend the Sikh worldview. Simply presenting Christian presuppositions and comparing them with the Sikh worldview will not convince a Sikh of the validity of Christian faith. Sincerely seeking to understand the framework of Sikh religion, way of life, and cultural assumptions and values, however, will open the door for communicating the Christian worldview. The bond of community, importance of family, and deep sense of duty (dharma), service (sewa), and hospitality to others are just a few of the distinctive cultural values Sikhs embrace. Extreme reverence of the Guru Granth Sahib, the place of gurus, the oneness of God, and the all‐encompassing rule of the law of karma are some of the unique religious perspectives Sikhs espouse.

Having begun with such orientation to the Sikh worldview, Christians then can compare it with the Christian worldview (see table 2 for comparison overview). Sharing is best when they remain mindful of the context of Sikhism in the effort to promote a clearer hearing of the Christian message. One of the questions Sikhs may ask Christians up‐front is, “Do you know what a Sikh believes?” A contextualized approach to Christian witness not only makes the gospel more understandable, but also the communicator more credible. After this foundation is laid, the following theological discussion proceeds more effectively.

COMPARING AND CONTRASTING

The best definition that any Sikh can give regarding the concept of God in Sikhism is to quote the Mulmantra—the fundamental creed of Sikhism, which appears at the beginning of the Guru Granth Sahib, volume 1, Japuji, the first verse: “There exists but one God, who is called The True, The Creator, Free from fear and hate, Immortal, Not Begotten, Self‐Existent, Great and Compassionate.”

The Christian concept of God, by contrast, is that God is the God of history. God’s plan for the world is unfolded from Genesis to Revelation. History is the divine purpose of God in concrete form. Many of the fulfilled plans of God since His creation show the evidence that He can be trusted. God is active throughout the history of humankind, first in the account of the Jewish people, and then in Jesus Christ in the New Testament. “The Bible is fundamentally a history book—the history of God’s redemptive acts, past, present and future. This ‘salvation history,’ especially the part called the New Testament, reveals that God is always acting according to His plan. The Bible, therefore, may be best understood as a history of the administration of a single divine plan for the redemption of the cosmos” (emphasis in original).¹⁰

The nature of God that emerges from the Bible and the nature of God in the Guru Granth carry somesimilarities cited in the Mulmantra above, but there are fundamental doctrinal distinctives to be weighed, such as God’s triunity, His fatherhood, His communicable attributes, and His covenant relationship with His people.

Sikhs teach that the nature of humanity is essentially good; the divine sparks that are within people need only to be fanned into a flame of goodness. Guru Nanak taught that a person’s sin is caused by environment. These moral lapses may be cleansed through meditation and prayer.¹¹

Christians teach that the nature of humanity is sinful. Unlike in Sikhism, human sin is a crucial part of Christian theology. The Bible teaches that people inherit a sinful nature from Adam. In Romans 8:5–7

Paul talks of human nature directed by sin. This depravity of the sin nature is more than just the acts of transgression. A person’s sin is caused by his or her own nature. Sikhs do not mention the concept of sin at all. Bad actions do lead to bad karma, but bad actions are not considered sins, per se. Bad actions lead to bad retribution, morally speaking. People are not judged according to a divine code; they are judged according to the religious code of ethics and moral conduct that they select and exercise for themselves.

Sikhism tends to place a great deal of emphasis on the works of its followers to attain liberation from the cycle of transmigration and reincarnation. A Sikh can never be certain that even if he or she lives an obedient life, follows the five‐stage path as prescribed by his religion, and recites the name of God and prayers, he can be free from the law of karma and its consequent reincarnations. Would he be reborn in a higher existence or lower existence? Would he reach mukti, or be released into the Ultimate Reality? He doesn’t know, and to a certain extent doesn’t care. For the Sikh, salvation, liberation, and realization of God and self may be achieved here and now through love and service to others. The Sikh mindset is focused on the foreground of the moment, not the background of the afterlife of mystery and wonder.

In contrast, the New Testament Scriptures emphasize that when we put our faith in Christ, we are saved by grace only. Salvation is bestowed as the free gift of God for the undeserving sinner because of Christ’s redeeming work on the cross (Rom. 3:24; 2 Cor. 5:18–19; Eph. 2:5–9). This strong theme of assurance for salvation occurs in the New Testament Scriptures time and again.

SHARING THE PROOF HE HAS GIVEN

One of the main objections of Sikhs to Christianity is that it is too exclusive. It is contrary to the Sikh belief in pluralism, that all roads lead to the same God. Christ’s claim in John 14:6–7, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you really know me, you would know my Father as well. From now on you do know him and have seen him” (NIV) is a challenging concept to explain to the Sikhs. No Sikh guru or founder of any major religion ever made this claim, nor could one ever support such an astounding assertion, as Christ did. Christ’s claims to His own uniqueness are backed in the gospels by His sinless life and, above all, resurrection. There are numerous pieces of evidence for the fact of the resurrection in Scripture.¹²Paul said that Christ’s resurrection provides the “proof” of Christianity. The concluding statement of Paul’s Athenian address was, “He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead” (17:31b).¹³

TREMBLING BEFORE THE NAME

In addition to theological refutation, the mention of supernatural encounters of individual Sikhs with God can demonstrate the reality of Christianity. There are many stories of transformed lives, but two well‐known conversions of Sikhs stand out in the Christian history of India.

One Sikh convert, Sadhu Sundar Singh, had a dramatic conversion experience in the early 1900s in Punjab. His encounter with Christ was a powerful testimony of God’s saving grace. He was fourteen when the sudden death of his mother sent him on a downward spiral that began with his persecution of Christian missionaries, who he viewed as representatives of a so‐called loving God who had failed to save his mother. One evening, after burning a Bible page by page for the amusement of his friends, Singh retired to his room with thoughts of suicide, only to confront in the small hours of the morning the risen Christ in a vision that forever changed his destiny. He would survive the horrifying night to become a legendary evangelist and, eventually, die a martyr for the God he once despised.

Another well‐known Sikh convert was Bakht Singh, who was born in Punjab into a devout Sikh family. In the late 1920s, he is believed to have embraced a more liberal lifestyle; then, on a transatlantic voyage, curiosity led him to attend a Christian service. He knelt with the others for prayer, and later wrote, “I was trembling….I felt a divine power entering into me. I was repeating the name of Jesus again and again. I felt great peace”; thus he was won to Christ.¹⁴ A Christian who is prepared to present the reality ofChrist’s redemption lovingly and relationally with the Sikh mindset in view is well equipped to win more Sikhs to Christ.

NOTES

1. From September 2001 to January 2002, Kaur and a cameraman traveled across the country, documenting the crimes of prejudice. In 2004, director Sharat Raju turned the footage into a feature‐length documentary, titled Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath, and produced by New Moon Productions. To see a clip of Divided We Fall, visit www.dwf‐film.com. Visit Kaur’s blog at www.valariekaur.blogspot.com.
2. Manpreet Singh, “Power in Punjab: Christians See Churches and Opposition Grow among Sikhs,” Christianity Today, July 1, 2003, ctlibrary.com/ct/2003/july/16.24.html
3. “PM Exhorts Sikhs to Prepare for Next 400 Years,” Tribune News Service, September 1, 2006, http://www.tribuneindia.com/2004/20040903/nation.htm.
4. Vinay Lal, “Sikhism: A Capsule Account,” Manas: India and Its Neighbors, http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Religions/paths/Sikhism.html.
5. Nikky‐Guninder Kaur Singh, Sikhism: World Religions (New York: Facts on File, 1993), 21.
6. Ranbir Singh Sandhu, “Sikhs in America: Stress and Survival,” Sikh Spectrum, no. 4, September 2002, http://www.sikhspectrum.com/092002/survival.htm.
7. Mikel Neumann, “The Incarnational Ministry of Jesus,” in Encountering New Religious Movements: A Holistic Evangelical Approach, ed. Irving Hexham, Stephen Rost, and John W. Morehead II (Grand Rapids: Kregel Publications, 2004), 37.
8. “Sikism [sic],” GodWeb, http://www.godweb.org/linkssikism.htm.
9. Asa Mohalla 5.
10. Dean Davis, “One Shot, One Bible, One God: Apologetics and the Unity of Scripture,” Christian Research Journal 27, 5 (2004): 37 (http://www.equip.org/JAO110).
11. Ram Gidoomal and Margaret Wardell, Lions, Princesses, Gurus: Reaching Your Sikh Neighbor (Godalming, UK: MacLaurin Institute, 1996), 143.
12. See, for example, Jesus Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate between William Lane Craig and Gerd Lüdemann, ed. Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000); Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1998), and Frank Morrison’s classic work on the subject, Who Moved the Stone? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958).
13. Ajith Fernando, The Christian’s Attitude toward World Religions (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 1987), 72.
14. Reuben David, “The Passing of an Era: A Tribute to Bakht Singh,” Urbana, http://www.urbana.org/_articles.cfm?RecordId=385.

Table 1:

The Sikh Gurus

Table 2:A Comparison of Key Theological Concepts in Christianity and Sikhism ¹⁵

15. For a detailed account of the history of the guruship in Sikhism, see Sukhbir S. Kapoor, Sikhs and Sikhism (East Sussex, UK:Wayland Publishers Limited, 1982), 16–29. For a brief summary of the history, beliefs, and practices of Sikhism, see WinfriedCorduan, Pocket Guide to World Religions (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2006) and C. Wayne Mayhall, Roger Schmidt, et al., Patterns of Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing, 2004).

Synopsis

Who are the Shia (or Shiite)Muslims we see headlining our daily news? Shiites make up only ten percent of the Muslim world but comprise almost half of the Muslims in the Middle East. They live on top of, and work in the production of, most of the oil and gas fields in the Middle East. The story of Shiites, Sunnis, Christians, and Jews is intertwined throughout their history. There are more Christians of three major strands in the Middle East than there are Jews in the entire world. Shiism began with the death of Muhammad and the decision of who should succeed Muhammad as leader. Shiites, believing it should be a blood relative, followed Ali, who in turn was followed by a series of Imams. Some distinctions from Sunnis include: exaltation of the family of Muhammad, praying only three times a day, a passion motif with a desire for martyrdom, belief in the return of their last Imam, and the practice of muta (temporary marriages) and taquiyya (dissimulation or lying).

The politics and religions of the Middle East are historically interwoven. Today it pits Iran and Shiites of Iraq, Lebanon, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia against the Sunnis of the Middle East. The disgust of Iranian leaders with the Little Satan (Israel) is only exceeded by their disgust for the Great Satan (America). Points of contact for Christians sharing Christ’s love with Shiites include: the passion motif and the death of Christ, the return of the Mahdi and the return of Christ, and their desire for a mediator and Christ’s mediation. As a result of Khomeini’s revolution beginning in 1979, more Iranians (many say at least 160,000) have come to Christ than ever before in history.

Whether the message is inescapable in the fear-mongering rhetoric of a YouTube video or downplayed without fanfare by the anchorperson on the evening news, Americans are no longer in the dark regarding the harsh reality that many Muslims outside our borders have a negative impression of America.

In fact, in the eyes of many within the anti-American Muslim world, there is but one criminal more worthy of being brought to justice than “the Little Satan” known as Israel; that is America, “the Great Satan.” Among other causes, anti-American sentiment continues to escalate because of what Hollywood communicates about America (alcohol consumption and a sexual ethic characterized by immodesty, adultery, fornication, and homosexuality), because America has military bases in Saudi Arabia and thus defends Islam’s two most holy cities, and because America has female soldiers helping to defend these two cities of Mecca and Medina, doing what Muslims believe Muslim men should be doing.

CHRISTIANS IN THE SHIITE WORLD

Yet the story left untold by the mainstream media is the great work of the gospel in the Middle East and in other Muslim countries and the growth of Christianity there. Middle Eastern churches come in three forms: the historic churches with Coptic, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Assyrian, and Armenian roots; a variety of Protestant denominations as found in the West; and individuals and congregations of Muslim-background believers in Christ.

There appear to be more Christians in the Middle East (fifteen million) than there are Jews in the entire world (thirteen million). That number of Christians is shrinking as they face persecution and flee to the West. Saddam Hussein’s Foreign Minister, Tareq Aziz, was a Christian and the former UN Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, is an Egyptian Coptic Christian married to a Jew. In Iraq, despite the war, many Christians have resumed church attendance and a seminary was formed, while many other Christians have fled due to persecution, usually from Sunnis who believe that Christians side with the Shias.

Behind the rush of mainstream media there are stories of clashes between the crescent and the cross, Islam and modernity, and Shiites and Sunnis. Our lives in the West are affected by the story of a historic rift between the two major Islamic divisions and the emergence of the Shia (or Shiite) Muslim minority as a significant force in social, political, and religious world affairs. It is a story as old as the traditions that both groups painstakingly preserve and as fresh as the blood of the Shiite women and children that covered the ground where—at the time of this writing—Sunni women strapped with explosives allowed themselves to be blown up.

HISTORICAL ROOTS

In the sixth century, Islam’s spiritual messenger, the prophet Muhammad, whom Muslims believe was illiterate, made it known that he had received revelations from an angel of God. He shared these revelations with his people in such arresting and beautiful language that a group began to accept Muhammad as their prophet. These revelations were eventually compiled into Islam’s sacred scripture, the Qur’an, which means “recite.”1

In his preaching, Muhammad spoke of the necessity of submission to the will of Allah. Today, the word “Islam,” which also means “peace,” is defined by the derivative word “submission,” and twenty-one percent of the world’s population (1,449,000,000)—making Islam the second largest religion in the world behind Christianity—attempts to practice a life of such submission, primarily in North Africa, the Middle East, South-Central Asia, and Indonesia. Closer to home, roughly one-fifth of the more than 530,000 international students in the United States come from forty Islamic countries.

On June 8, AD 632, Muhammad died, and immediately fol­lowing his death, two major traditions emerged, divided over who should succeed the great prophet who had united all the once war­ring tribes of the broad plains of Arabia, around the city of Mecca, near the banks of the Red Sea in what today is known as the Arabian Peninsula. Four “Rightly Guided” Caliphs, or successors, followed: Abu Bakr, from AD 632 to 634; Umar, from 634 to 644; Uthman, from 644 to 656; and Ali, from 656 to 661.

Ali, the fourth “Rightly Guided” Caliph, inherited a power struggle between a powerful Syrian Muslim government and his own people and in AD 661 was assassinated by a Kharijite soldier while on his way to prayer at a mosque.

After the murder of the Caliph Ali, his followers, eventually called Shiites, claimed that it was the divine right of the family of Muhammad to rule. When leadership is decided by other factors, they argued, disaster is imminent. Through being a cousin of Muhammad and by his marriage to Fatima, daughter of Muhammad and Khadija, Ali was a kinsman of the Prophet and therefore the legitimate leader of Muslims. Shia Muslims claim that authority is granted in this way. Such authority is invested with even more power within the community through the passion associated with the assassinations of Ali and, later, his son Husayn.

Ali was assassinated because some perceived him too weak to lead and his son, Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad himself, claimed leadership. The people of what is now Iraq called Husayn to lead, and Husayn accepted. At Karbala (AD 680) on his jour­ney from Medina, however, he and his family were killed by forces of Yazid, his opponent in the struggle for power. The deaths of Husayn and his family are the source of the passion motif that drives Shiites and that they believe paves the way to paradise. Husayn’s family died before his eyes, and Husayn’s head was deliv­ered as a trophy to Yazid. Thus, the loyalty to this line of succes­sion and the emotional power of the martyrdom of Ali and his son Husayn distinguish the Shiite strand within Islam. Sunni Muslims, in contrast, focus leadership more on the consensus of the community and on reasoned argument concerning matters of faith. (The second sidebar describes differences in matters of faith between the Sunnis and the Shiites.)

In its long and extremely complicated history, the Shiite ver­sion of Islam has developed some distinctive theologies and a vari­ety of religious subgroups. Probably out of its reverence for Ali, Shia Islam came to regard the community leader, the Imam (the Muslim equivalent of the Catholic Pope), as an infallible being who was the only one who knew the hidden and true meaning of the Qur’an. One group of Shiites, the Twelvers, recognizes twelve Imams in their history, the last of whom disappeared in 873. It is believed that this twelfth Imam has continued to live until this day in a state of hiddenness or occultation. One day he will return as the Mahdi (the guided one) and inaugurate a period of righteous­ness prior to the last judgment. During this long period of hid­denness preceding the Twelfth (or Hidden) Imam’s return, the fuqaha (religious scholars) provide guidance to the people in regard to law and doctrine. The Twelvers constitute the majority of Shia Muslims.

A smaller subgroup within Shia Islam is the Ismailis. The distinguishing feature of this group originates in the identity of the seventh in the series of Imams. The main body of Shiites accepts Musa as the seventh Imam, but the Ismailis instead rec­ognize his brother, Ismail. Since Ismail’s disappearance, they have awaited his return and hence are usually called Seveners instead of Twelvers. The seven Imams recognized by the Ismailis are, in a sense, higher in excellence than the Prophet, because they receive their teachings directly from God Himself. Although many other divisions exist within Shia Islam, the distinction between the Seveners and the Twelvers is the most dramatic.

A third group of Shiites, the Zaydiyya, are closest to the Sunni Muslims in doctrine. The Zaydiyya have historically ruled Yemen and exist in some other areas. Other sects branched off of Shia Islam, including the Druze from Ismaili Shiism and the Alawiyya, or the Babis, from Twelver Shiism.

The Shiites believe, in contrast to the Sunnis, that divine knowledge is mediated through the infallible teachings of an Imam. Consequently, all knowledge derived from fallible, human sources is worthless. It is not what the community thinks, but rather what the Imam proclaims, that is authoritative. This posi­tion effectively narrows the scope for toleration of divergent views. Another major difference from Sunni Islam was the emer­gence of a “passion history” among the Shiites. The violent death of Ali’s son, Husayn, in AD 680 is celebrated annually with plays, orations, and processions. The influence of this emphasis on pas­sion history is also felt in the veneration in which Shia Muslims hold Ali and his family and in the respect that they show for his descendents.

The total Shiite movement makes up approximately ten per­cent of the Islamic world. The greatest concentration is in Iran, where more than eighty percent of the population is Shiite while Iraq is about fifty-five percent Shiite. It is within Iran and between Iran and other Muslim nations that the conflict between the Shiites and the Sunnis became explosive at the end of the twentieth century. Thus, the early period in Islam’s history pro­vides perhaps the major theological distinction in the religion even today—that between Shiite and Sunni. The history of Islamic expansion continued primarily, however, with the Sunnis during the Umayyad and Abbasid dynasties.

THEOLOGY AND PRACTICE

Shiites agree with Sunnis in most areas of Islamic theology, including Muhammad as the final prophet, the Qur’an as God’s final book replacing what came before it, and Islam as God’s final and perfect religion. There is also basic agreement on the five pil­lars of Islam: to recite the Shahadah2 and bear witness to Allah and Muhammad, Allah’s messenger; to pray five times a day; to fast; to give alms; and to make the pilgrimage to Mecca.

Shiites, however, combine two of the prayers two times a day so they only need to pray three times. In a Shiite mosque one sees pictures of their holy places where their Imams are buried and sometimes pictures of Ali, Husayn, or Muhammad, while in Sunni mosques pictures are considered idolatrous.

All Muslims hold to the Qur’an and Hadith (tradition) as authority. However, Sunnis follow the Qur’an more, and Shiites follow their tradition more. Shiites push Ali almost to the role of deity and call him “Valayat Allah” (in the place of God). Many unknowingly quote the Bible and credit Ali.

Sunni Islam has four schools of law and Shiism has one, the Jafari School. Shiism is not a Mutazilite division of Islam (ratio­nalists) but it has been strongly influenced by the Mutazilites, emphasizing human responsibility and believing that human rea­son is foundational along with the Qur’an. “Mutazilite denial of predestination and acceptance of free will, essential prerequisites for God’s justice on the Last Day, were thus accepted and main­tained by the Shia, in contrast to the Sunna.”3 Shiites hold that the Qur’an is created and Sunnis believe it is eternal and uncreat­ed, which is a major issue in Muslim theology.

One is struck by the exalted place given to the prophet’s fam­ily at the expense of the prophet.4 Twelver Shiites will speak more of Hussein, Ali, and then Muhammad, in that order. Preachers might quote Jafar al-Sadiq, the sixth Imam, the most because he codified Shiite law, theology, and ethics. (Within Sunni theology clearly Muhammad would be referred to most frequently.) Shiites say that “Ali is not God but he is not separate from God.”5

Muhammad stated, “I have two great and precious things among you: the book of Allah and my household.”6 By this Shiites communicate that Shiism is God’s path because the family of Muhammad (ahl al-bayt) is the foundation of Islam. Ahl al-bayt is one of the names for Shiism.

Al-Muzaffar, a leading twentieth-century Shiite scholar from Najaf, Iran, and founder of the College of Islamic Studies, clari­fies that Allah ordered that people obey and submit to the author­ity of the Imams. Obeying their commands is the same as obey­ing God’s commands. Friendship or hatred of them is the same as friendship or hatred of God. “It is a sin to deny them, for every­one who denies them in fact denies the Messenger, and that is the same as denying Allah.”7

The Imams are considered to be sinless and infallible. “The Imam is able to understand information about anything, any­where, and at anytime, and he understands by the means of Divinely-given power at once.”8 Shiites believe that at all times subsequent to Muhammad there has to be an Imam present. The twelfth Imam is present today and hidden just as Muhammad was hidden in the cave.9 A cardinal doctrine of Twelvers is the return of the Mahdi, the hidden twelfth Imam, who will bring an end to war.

The Doctrine of Mut’a.

Two of the unique doctrines of Shiism that are difficult for Westerners to understand are mut’a and taqiyyah. Mut’a (enjoyment) or segah is temporary marriage, where a contract between a man and woman is agreed on and the woman is married to the man for one hour or for a longer period.

One Mullah explained that the only difference between mut’a and prostitution is that in prostitution you agree on a price in advance and in mut’a you do not. So in addition to four wives, a Shiite man may have countless mut’a relationships, or legalized concubines. Frequently, these temporary wives are obtained when Shiites make their pilgrimages to Karbala, Najaf, Qom, and Mashhad or to one of the countless Imam Zadehs (tombs of the Imams and their descendants). Some call these places of pilgrim­age religiously legalized prostitution centers. All one needs is a contract that a simple village Mullah can write for a small fee.This piece of paper gives permission and removes it from the state of sin. Recently, Mustafa Pour Mohammedi, the Interior Minister and head of the secret police of Iran, publicly encouraged more segah or mut’a in order to help keep society pure by preventing homosexuality and fornication.10

The Doctrine of Taqiyyah.

Taqiyyah (dissimulation) is also unique to Shiism. When a Shiite is asked by a Sunni if he is a Shiite, and if his life, property, or family is threatened, he can legally say that he is a Sunni. In Iraq, where there have always been Shiite/Sunni conflicts, this has been a valuable resource for Shiites. A Persian has said that this doctrine and practice has fully permeated the culture of Iran. Even Khomeini practiced it, blam­ing the Great Satan (America) or the Little Satan (Israel) for problems or weakness within Iran.

Taqiyyah is not in the Qur’an, but it may have its roots there. Five times the Qur’an says that God is a deceiver; two of those times it says that He is the greatest deceiver (3:54; 8:30; 10:21). The Arabic word is makara, which Hans Wehr’s standard Arabic-English dictionary, translates as “deceive, delude, cheat, dupe, gull, double-cross.”11 Muslim translators of the Qur’an, however, work­ing to put on a positive spin, translate it with “plot, plan, and plan­ner.” Nonetheless, Shiites reason that if God can deceive, they can tell a lie for a good cause.

Obviously, this clearly encourages lying, which in turn builds distrust in a society. It is difficult to build relationships with a lack of trust and with the assumption of ulterior motives. To some degree deception affects the Muslim world as a whole, for many stores are small and not self-service. They do not trust employees, customers, or even spouses. When Muslims come to faith in Christ, this distrust carried over from their past can become an issue within the fellowship.

The Pilgrimage

Imam zadehs, the tombs of Shia Imams and their descendants and of other holy people, are significant places of pilgrimage or ziyarah. Second only to Mecca, Mashhad (the tomb of Rida the eighth Imam) in northeast Iran is the greatest place of pilgrimage for Iranians. Imam Rida said, “Whoever undertakes a pilgrimage of his own free will, believing in it, for him the Imams will intercede on the day of resurrection.”12 For those who are too poor to go to Mecca or to Mashhad, it is likely that one of the roughly two thousand imam zadehs serving as acceptable pilgrimage sites is reasonably close to their home. In Shia Islam, mediation between man and God is not necessary, but is helpful.

CONTEMPORARY EVENTS

One of the basic mistakes of the West is to assume that other cul­tures are like our own, that most people share our values, really want democracy, and should have a separation of church and state. In Islam, however, there is no separation of mosque and state, of religion and government. Islam at heart is not democratic; purely Islamic countries ultimately are ruled by religious leaders under sharia (divine) Islamic law. Many Muslims only want a democra­cy when they are in the majority, such as Shiites in Iraq.

The Sunni/Shiite conflict, moreover, is not a Persian/Arab conflict, for most of the Shiites of Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon, and Bahrain are Arab. The founding Shiites and all twelve of its Imams were Arabs. The Shiites of Azerbaijan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and India are neither Persians nor Arabs. A broader view of certain contemporary events and the connection these events have between Shiite and Sunni relations today will be help­ful in placing the ongoing conflict in its context.

The Sunnis’ Attack

One of the major turning points of the Iraq war took place on February 22, 2006, when Sunnis bombed the golden dome of the al-Askari mosque in Samarra. The Golden Mosque contains the tombs of the tenth and eleventh Imams and it is the location where the twelfth Imam went into his state of occultation. The Sunnis knew how to provoke Shiites. The bombing ignited sig­nificant rioting and raised civilian fatalities from five hundred a month to almost nine hundred.

Ayatollah Khomeini’s Revolution “By far the most rhetorically successful revolutionary Shi’i was Ayatollah Khomeini (1902–1989) who ultimately engineered the downfall of the Persian monarchy.”13 Khomeini’s Iranian revolu­tion of 1979 overthrowing the Shah, Western interference, and secularism, influenced the whole Muslim world, inspiring them to reject subservience to the West. Some consider 1979 the official end of colonialism.

Khomeini wanted to obtain Saudi Arabia’s support for his revolution so he spoke of it as an Islamic revolution and a Middle East revolution, not a Shiite or Iranian revolution. He desired to unite the Middle East and the Muslim world and to take over Mecca and Medina under his leadership. He wanted to dominate as much of the world as he could. He failed, so he had to start working on his neighbors (Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) one at a time.14

Khomeini believed that one must go through Iraq to win Jerusalem. Some Shiites believe either America will pull out and thus give southern Iraq to Iran or they will divide Iraq by race and religion—Sunni Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiite Arabs. The sec­ond language taught in southern Shiite Iraq is Farsi or Persian (the principal language of Iran), and the majority of the residents of Karbala and Najaf speak Farsi as a second language.

Saddam Hussein’s Barrier

When the allies invaded Iraq on March 20, 2003, they appeared ignorant of the Shiite majority of fifty-five percent, as if they did not exist. Saddam Hussein oppressed them because as a majority they were a threat to his minority regime. Now that the allies have rid Iraq of Hussein, however, Shiite influence is again alive and well. Mahmood, an optimistic Sunni, holds an interesting view: “A democratic government in Iraq with the Shiite representatives who are moderate will have its impact on the Iranian politics, as it will encourage the moderate Iranians to continue their struggle against the hardliner Iranian clergy and in the end there may be much more peace in the region than what we have seen so far.”15

Hussein was the biggest barrier to an Iranian invasion of Iraq. There is widespread speculation that the reason Hussein would not let inspectors see all of his potential sites of weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s) was because he did not want Iran to know that he did not have WMD’s in order to prevent Iran’s aggression against Iraq. Middle Eastern politics is replete with taqiyyah. Indeed, Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, masterfully exploits the world’s worries over Iran’s possible nuclear capabilities in conjunction with his claims that Iran is neither constructing a nuclear weapon nor plans to do so. As with Iraq, a perceived threat can deter neighbors and build self-esteem.

An Unholy Alliance

Why is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad so hateful of Israel, threatening to wipe it off the map and denying the Holocaust? One likely reason is the teachings of the Qur’an itself. The Medinan suras (chapters in the Qur’an), in contrast to the suras given in Mecca, are strongly anti-Jewish. Sura 5:82 translated by Pickthall states: “Thou wilt find the most vehement of mankind in hostility to those who believe (to be) the Jews and the idolaters.” In Mecca, Muhammad thought he was bringing the same message as the Jews and Christians, only in the Arabic language. But in Medina, the Jews rejected Muhammad as God’s prophet and as bringing the same message as the Taurat (Torah— the five books of Moses).

A second reason for Ahmadinejad’s hostility is that for Muslims, Israel is a type of colonialism, with America having a fifty-first state that does not pay taxes to it, but which the US is obligated to defend and finance by more than three billion dollars per year. It is an insult to Muslims that the Jews could come in and steal their land, which Muslims won during the Crusades a mil­lennium ago. Mullahs preach that Israel drinks the blood of Muslims and we should make them thirsty. In other words, they intend to provoke war.

Maybe even a larger reason is that Ahmadinejad is “out-Arabizing” the Arabs in their hatred for Israel. Israel took, or retook, Arab lands, not Iranian lands. The average Arab in the street believes Ahmadinejad is bravely doing what Arabian lead­ers are afraid to do. So Ahmadinejad is working to unite the Muslim world on his side, and helping Sunni Arabs to accept Shiites and Iran.

A significant reason that Ahmadinejad appears not to be afraid of war is that martyrdom is part and parcel of Shiism, since the mar­tyrdom of Muhammad’s grandson Husayn is the foundation stone of Shiism. Igniting a major war, especially one involving “the Great Satan,” Ahmadinejad believes, would help bring back the Mahdi. On November 16, 2005, in a Tehran speech he declared: “Our revolution’s main mission is to pave the way for the glorious reappear­ance of Imam Mahdi; may Allah hasten his reappearance.”16

In the meantime, within Iranian politics, if another group or politician such as Ali Akhbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani is critical of government policies, Ahmadinejad accuses them of being anti-Islam.Today, many Iranians, especially the younger generation, are not proud to be Muslims but are proud to be Iranians and are weary of their government’s politics and restrictions.

Saudi Arabia and Syria Saudi Arabia vehemently protests Shiites and Iran gaining control in Iraq, for it could embolden their own Shiites who live on top of, and work in, their oil and gas fields.They alsorealize that Iran and its Shiite friends would like to control Mecca and Medina.

Syria, however, benefits in an alliance with predominantly Shia Iran. The Assad regime in Syria is Alawi in faith, a sect rooted in Shiism. Although Alawis comprise only eleven percent of the Syrian population, many of their highest military officers are Alawis. Despite the fact that many Muslims do not consider Alawis to be truly Muslim, the Assads persuaded Khomeini and Lebanese Shia leader Musa al-Sadr (the founder of the Amal militia, who disappeared in 1978) to issue fatwas (Muslim reli­gious decrees) stating that Alawis are Shias and, therefore, Muslims. The Assads, furthermore, have made Syria a secular country to legitimatize their rule.

Syria is also an enemy of both Iraq and Israel, which further encourages Syria to be a friend of Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah party (Party of God) that Iran controls. Syria’s population only totals sixteen million, while Iran boasts a population of seventy-two million. Iran plans to build an oil pipeline across Iran to Syria and the Mediterranean. There is no majority in Lebanon, but the Shiites are the largest minority and Syria is a supporter of them.

Militias’ Malicious Intent

The Amal (“hope”) and Hezbollah are both Shiite militias in Lebanon, now political parties, with Amal being pro-Syrian and anti-Iranian and Hezbollah, the more radical, being Iran’s party. But Hezbollah also has Sunnis in it, as it is more political than religious. Hezbollah’s militia, having learned the cult of martyrdom taught by Khomeini (who in turn learned it from the Shiite passion motif of Husayn), sent a suicide truck bomber into the US Marine barracks in Lebanon on October 23, 1983, killing 241 Marines and servicemen. Later that day they killed fifty-eight French troops with a truck bomb. As a result, President Ronald Reagan pulled out the remaining US forces. This taught the Shiites that martyrdom and force get results and America can be compelled to back down. The Sunnis later learned this lesson as well.

So an anti-American, anti-Israeli alliance between Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran continues to grow. Hezbollah (founded, financed, and trained by Iran) is the only instance where Khomeini’s revolution was successfully transplanted outside of Iran’s borders. “If the Lebanon war popularized Iran as a bulwark against Israel and champion of the Palestinian cause, Iraq’s sectarian woes evoke a very different response: fear of Shia domination over a divided Middle East.”17 “Sunnis feel threatened by the violence of Shia militias in Iraq and Hezbollah adventurism in Lebanon.”18 “The older default strategy left over from the Cold War, when the Middle East was a sideshow that local authoritar­ian rulers could be counted on to keep under control, will simply no longer suffice. For the United States, the challenge remains how to respond to the radicalism in the Sunni world and also pre­vent it from spreading to Shias.”19

PRINCIPLES FOR EVANGELISM

There are principles or strategies for evangelism that have proven useful on the mission field and that are also helpful when encountering Muslims at home. For example, there are doctrines and practices unique to Shiites that provide contact points or bridges between Islam and Christianity, including the passion motif, the need for a mediator, and the second coming of the Mahdi.

Muslim theology teaches that Christ did not die on a cross, but some Shiites do not know this or it is not an issue with them. Husayn was a Muslim martyr but Christ was more than a martyr; He died for our sins to be forgiven. As Christ ­ians regularly remember the death of Christ in communion, Muslims remember the death of Husayn annually for ten days with plays depicting the martyrdom and with the Ashura parade and beatings.

Christians teach Christ’s deity sometimes without emphasizing His humanity. It can be helpful to begin with His humanity and His suffering as Mark and Acts do, and then lead to “Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matt. 16:16 KJV). Sunnis believe there is no mediator between God and man. Shiites believe you do not have to have a mediator, but that it can help. So the Shia Imams have special power with God to help get one’s prayers answered, which is done at their tombs or the tombs of their holy descendants. Christians believe in one intercessor, the man Christ Jesus. Passages that address the wonderful provision of an intercessor and mediator in Jesus Christ include John 17:3, Romans 5:10, Hebrews 7:25, and 1 John 2:1.

All Muslim theology holds to a return of Christ and of Muhammad, when Christ will return, marry, have children, destroy all crosses and pigs, deny His crucifixion, His deity, and the Trinity, and then will die. Iranian Shiites, however, believe that the twelfth Imam, the Mahdi, was removed by God at the age of four or five in AD 873 and is in a miraculous state of hiddenness. Occasionally he appears and speaks with special people. Following much conflict and war he will reappear with Christ. The return of Christ and the return of the Mahdi are very close in concept. As noted above, many believe that Ahmadinejad wants to stir this conflict and bring the Mahdi back sooner.

In crossing these evangelistic bridges, it is easy to begin by asking the Muslim what he or she believes about one of these doc­trines and let the Muslim explain. Then say, “This has some sim­ilarity to what the Bible teaches” and have them read the biblical account and explain it. From here the discussion can readily go into our need for forgiveness and who Christ is.20

Another principle of evangelism is to look for people groups and ethnicities within Islam that may be more responsive to Christ. Shiites have historically been marginalized and looked down on by the majority Sunnis. Many Muslims in the West, especially after 9/11, consider themselves second-class citizens looked down on by Westerners, but Shiites are more defensive with even fewer friends in the West. They are a minority within a minority.

Within the Shiite world it can be helpful to study the Shiite minorities or cults that have broken off from it. The Alevis in Turkey make up about twenty percent of the population but about fifty percent of Muslim-background believers in Christ. Could there be other minorities within a minority who might be open to the Holy Spirit’s leading? For instance, six Ismaili people groups live remotely in the Pamir Mountains of Tajikistan with no known Pamiri believers and no known witness. Many times the unreached ethnicities and minorities may be more responsive first to friend­ship and then to the gospel.

God has worked in an amazing way among Iranians fol­lowing the Iranian revolution. This is in spite of, or maybe because of, Iran having the third worst record of persecution of Christians in the entire world. When Khomeini returned to Iran in 1979, there were at the most three hundred Persian Muslim-background believers in Christ and two small fellowships. Today in Iran and around the world there are at least 160,000 Farsi­speaking, Muslim-background believers in Christ and at least 150 fellowships.

Most major cities in North America have one or more Farsi­speaking fellowships. Khomeini came saying he was bringing pure Islam, and many Iranians have concluded that if this is pure Islam, they do not want anything to do with it. Khomeini created a Christ-shaped vacuum. Shiites, like Muslims around the world, have experienced dreams where Christ came to them and later they searched for the gospel and believed.21

It is easy to meet Shiite Muslims in the West. Different kinds of Shiite mosques function in many of our large cities, though frequently they are not called mosques. Imam Ali cen­ters or Shia Ithna-Asheri Jamaat or Ahlu Bayt centers are usu­ally English-speaking mosques with participants from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, or Pakistan. Mosques in the West are normally very friendly to outsiders.22

As the turmoil caused by Khomeini helped bring many to Christ, let us pray for God to use the conflict of Sunnis and Shiites killing each other to wake up Muslims that this politi­cal/religious practice is not from God. May we take steps of faith to befriend, help, and share Christ with Shiites and Muslims who live in our midst.

Patrick Cate has a Ph.D. in Islamics from Hartford Seminary. He and his wife, Mary Ann, have served for thirty-five years with Christar, including four years in Shiite Iran and five in Egypt.

C. Wayne Mayhall is a frequent contributor to the CHRISTIAN RESEARCH JOURNAL, adjunct professor of apologetics at Liberty University, and the author of Patterns of Religion (Cengage Publishing, 2003) and Religious Autobiographies (Cengage Publishing, 2004).

notes

1 For a more detailed account of Islamic history before and after the emergence of Shiism, see C. Wayne Mayhall, et. al., Patterns of Religion (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Cengage Learning, 2005), 407–47.

2 An English translation of the Shahadah or Islamic creed is, “There is no god but Allah, Muhammad is the apostle of Allah.”

3 Halm, 50.

4 J. Davidson Frame, “The Religious Life of the Persians,” The Moslem World 7 (1917): 171.

5 Ibid., 170.

6 Allamah Muhammad Rida al-Muzaffar, The Faith of Shi’a Islam (Islamic Republic of Iran: Ansariyan Publication, 1993), 35.

7 Ibid., 34.

8 Ibid., 33.

9 Ibid., 32.

10 This was said in a speech in Tehran on May 31, 2007. Kimia Sanati, “”Iran: Women Condemn Temporary Marriages as Degrading,” Inter Press Service English News Wire, June 26,2007, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P1-140969915.html.

11 Hans Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ed. J. Milton Cowan (Beirut: Librairie Du Liban, 1974), 917.

12 Al Muzaffar, 61.

13 Hamid Dabashi, “Modern Shi’i Thought,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Modern Islamic World, vol.4, ed. John L. Esposito (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 67.

14 Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York:

W. W. Norton and Company, 2006), 119–68.

15 Al Muzaffar, preface.

16 “Iran President Paves the Way for Arabs’ Imam Return,” Persian Journal, November 17,

2005, http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/exec/view.cgi/13/10945.

17 Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (New York:

W. W. Norton, 2007), 270.

18 Ibid., 271.

19 Ibid., 272.

20 For help in witnessing to Muslims see: Patrick O. Cate, “Islamic Values and the Gospel,”

in Vital Mission Issues: Examining Challenges and Changes in World Evangelism, ed. Roy B. Zuck (Grand Rapids: Kregel Resources, 1998), 201–17; and Patrick O. Cate, “Gospel Communication from Within,” International Journal of Frontier Missions, 11, 2 (April 1994): 93–97.

21 To read or view over one hundred testimonies of Muslim-background believers in Christ, many who were brought to Christ partially through a dream, see www.Answering­Islam.org. This is probably the best first site for Christians interested in understanding Islam and reaching Muslims.

22 To locate some of the ninety plus Shiite mosques in North America plus Shiite mosques in twenty-one other countries see www.Shia.org/organizations.

SYNOPSIS

Rarely reported by the America media, an intellectual civil war is occurring in Islam between scholars of the emerging Muslim reform movement and radicals who promote militant interpretations of Islam. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of the Muslim mainstream in the Middle East. The reformers see Islam as a flexible, nondogmatic religion adaptable to the modern world, and some even call for the separation of mosque and state. The militant extremists want to squeeze followers of Islam into a tight-fisted sectarianism at war with the entire “infidel” world. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda epitomize the destruction that the latter are capable of inflicting. The late Sayyid Qutb, a religious ideologue followed by bin Laden, maintained that there was a true and a false Islam and that Muslims must purify their lives according to his interpretation of Islam and then become part of a new vanguard of militants. This vanguard would advance into the world, militarily if necessary, with this original (pure) form of Islam to transform both Muslim societies and the West. It is a totalitarian vision that seeks to legislate its demands for what it calls social justice, wherever it goes. Qutb’s unorthodox view of violent jihad is the centrifugal force behind the momentum of the extremists, and it is competing with nonviolent versions of Islam for Muslim allegiance today.

Sayyid Qutb, the radical Egyptian ideologue whose theological/political dogma energizes Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, wrote extensively about implementing a totalitarian rule of Islam, nation after nation. Qutb’s rationale was straightforward: neither the contemporary Muslim world nor Western philosophical, political, or religious traditions could heal what he perceived as history’s fatal flaw: the deep divide between secular and sacred created by societies and nations. All societies and nations were following the idolatrous assumptions of a secularism that had reduced God’s rule to private religious life in order to keep God out of public and political life. By the 1950s, Qutb was calling this deep divide “the hideous schizophrenia” and was offering his own well-thought-out Islamic solution.

The well-read Qutb, however, knew that some Western philosophers, politicians, theologians, and even some scientists were troubled about the direction the world was headed. He was glad to see this awareness in their writings, but he lambasted it because, in his estimation, their fundamental analyses were wrong. They did not acknowledge the secular/sacred divide as the root problem; thus, their prescriptions were missing the mark and could not be efficacious.¹ Being a religious person, Qutb had some sympathy for the Christian clergy of the day who acknowledged the secular/sacred divide as the problem; however, for him, even these clergy loomed large in the West’s decline, because they were not capable of processing the kind of internal changes required for Christianity to overcome the hideous schizophrenia.²

Qutb’s True Islam

In place of what Qutb perceived as a failed Christianity and its historical, Western social and political experiments, Qutb offered what he believed was true Islam. It was to be more than a social experiment. It was to heal the secular/sacred divide, in the West and in the contemporary Muslim world. In a major work titled Social Justice in Islam, first published in 1949, Qutb shows what the “features and properties” of true Islam would look like in a society. The book is a careful explication of what Qutb calls “universal Islamic theory.” Its authoritative source, Qutb notes, is not Greek philosophy but “the Qur’an and the Traditions,” which provide a “general scheme” that is essential to grasp before one can begin to implement the future Qutb has in mind. Six points salient to this universal theory of justice can be identified:

1. Allah (God) is, a priori, an absolute unity.

2. “The Active Will” of Allah, from which “all creation” is “issuing,” or “emanating,” and is sustained and ordered, implies an “all-embracing unity” in nature and in the world of man.

3. The Creator gives “direct care and constant attention” to nature and the world of man, in which all of the “aspects [of life] are interconnected [politics, economics, faith, history, conduct, work, jurisprudence, etc.] so that one cannot possibly be separated from another.”

4. Mankind, however, had “lived through long ages without arriving at any comprehensive theory” by which to unite himself and the aspects of life to the essential unity, having developed and followed human creeds that militate against its “fundamental solidarity.”

5. This had produced a perennial struggle in which individuals and societies have differentiated between “spiritual and material powers” and either “denied one of these in order to strengthen the other, or…admitted the existence of both in a state of opposition and antagonism”; thus “the struggle between the two types of power continued, with men continually uncertain and perplexed and without any definite assurance as to the true solution.”

6. Then “came Islam, bringing with it a new, comprehensive, and coherent theory in which there was neither this tension nor this opposition, neither hostility nor antagonism. Islam gave a unity to all powers and abilities, it integrated all desires and inclinations and leanings, it gave a coherence to men’s efforts. In all these Islam saw one embracing unity which took in the universe, the soul, and all human life. Its aim was to unite earth and Heaven into one world; to join the present world and the world to come in one faith; to link spirit and body in one humanity; to correlate worship and work in one life. It sought to bring all these into one path—the path which leads to Allah.”³

LEGISLATING JUSTICE

With this working theory, Qutb makes clear his well-thought-out theological doctrines and domestic policies for legislating social justice. These policies address areas of public life, such as human rights, taxation, legislation, banking, debt, inheritance, charity, hunger prevention, theft, murder, property ownership, and courtroom testimony. His proposed policies, however, intrude into places where Western jurisprudence dare not legislate, touching areas of conduct that more overtly concern morality, such as adultery, fornication, mocking, flogging, drinking alcohol, hoarding, frivolous spending, overindulgence, and wastefulness. Throughout the book he juxtaposes many examples of what he means by social justice in Islam with policies of the West and the Soviet bloc, and he acknowledges issues on which Christian thinking agrees with Islam.

Tucked into the book, however, is a purpose so fundamental to Qutb’s passion that it should be considered as a seventh point in his universal theory: “There can be no permanent system in human life until this integration of unification has taken place; this step is a prerequisite for true and complete human life, even justifying the use of force against those who deviate from it, so that those who have wandered from the true path may be brought back to it.”⁴ This brings us to the mission of the vanguard.

Calling Forth the Vanguard…

In Milestones, a short book with a militant tone, Qutb calls forth a new breed of Muslim leadership, a vanguard—evidently borrowing the image from Lenin’s vanguard party movement—to implement his view of Islamic social justice. In the book, Qutb’s totalitarianism becomes aggressive, nonnegotiable, and revolutionary, which at first seems paradoxical given that much of the book is spent rebuking Muslims. Qutb, however, was no fan of his contemporary Muslim world. He boldly labeled it jahiliyah (in Muslim doctrine this word applies to anyone who is ignorant of divine guidance; according to Qutb, the word also describes such people as idolatrous). Muslims had always used the epithet derogatively to describe non-Muslims as pagans. It was a terrible insult, then, when Qutb used it to describe Muslims.

“Islam knows only two kinds of societies,” Qutb wrote, “the Islamic and the jahili. The Islamic society is that which follows Islam in belief and ways of worship, in law and organization, in morals and manners. The jahili society is that which does not follow Islam.”⁵ Relying on the Islamic doctrine of submission to God, Qutb concludes:

All existing so-called “Muslim” societies are also jahili societies. We classify them among jahili societies not because they believe in other deities besides God or because they worship anyone other than God, but because their way of life is not based on submission to God alone. Although they believe in the Unity of God, still they have relegated the legislative attribute of God to others and submit to this authority, and from this authority they derive their systems, their traditions and customs, their laws, their values and standards, and almost every practice of life.⁶

…To Remediate History’s Fatal Flaw

By this, Qutb means the Muslim world’s increasing assimilation to American materialism, to Western political philosophy and cultural norms, or to atheistic socialism. “The Muslim community,” he writes bluntly, “has been extinct for a few centuries.”⁷

With the whole world in such a sorry state and Qutb backed into this existential corner, he called forth a vanguard of sold-out disciples who would gather round him and take their cues straight from his interpretation of Muhammad’s generation. Only the rise of a purified vanguard could set things right, first, by taking concrete form in a nation:

If Islam is again to play the role of the leader of mankind, then it is necessary that the Muslim community be restored to its original form….In order to bring this about, we need to initiate the movement of Islamic revival in some Muslim country. Only such a revival will eventually attain to the status of world leadership. How is it possible to start the task of reviving Islam? It is necessary that there should be a vanguard which sets out with this determination and then keeps walking on the path, marching through the vast ocean of Jahiliyyah which has encompassed the entire world….I have written Milestones for this vanguard.⁸

Jihad: The Force behind the Vanguard

The vanguard was to be propelled by another of Qutb’s radical doctrines, his view of jihad, which gives today’s new jihadi groups their unrelenting, violent centrifugal force. Conventional wisdom today posits two, perhaps three, types of jihad. One would be a military jihad. Known as the “lesser jihad,” it is the call to war by a Muslim state against an enemy nation. It may be authorized only by the state and may be declared only by a legitimately recognized religious authority. It is somewhat similar to Western just-war theory. Another jihad is practiced by individual Muslims. Known as the “greater jihad,” it is the daily inner struggle against whatever seeks to prevent one from becoming a better Muslim. Seen this way, the concept is not unlike the Christian notion of personal struggle against sin. The greater jihad, however, may emerge as a nonviolent struggle against social, political, and economic injustice for the good of the community or nation. This third type of jihad could be called a social jihad. Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, whose mosque was just blocks from the World Trade Center, calls it a group jihad.⁹ The concept has parallels to nonviolent Christian social and political activism.

For Qutb, however, there is no picking and choosing—jihad is one. Jihad is a continuum—an unstoppable world-dominating process; but because Qutb considered Muslim religious and political leaders to be idolatrous, he thought it first necessary that “the Muslim community be restored to its original [pure] form…which is buried under the debris of man-made traditions…crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”¹⁰ For this “revival” to occur, it will not do for today’s vanguard simply to strap on the ammo and rush into battle. The vanguard must be held back and cleansed by studying the Qur’an, and only the Qur’an, for guidance. Once purified, then, and only then, will they be ready to prevail. Spiritual purity first, war second, social justice third. That was Qutb’s perceived pattern of the original vision of Islam (described in part one of this series), and he insisted that the vanguard follow it. “Only such a revivalist movement will eventually attain the status of world leadership,” he writes. “It is essential for mankind to have new leadership….Without doubt, we possess this new thing which is perfect to the highest degree, a thing which mankind does not know about and is not capable of ‘producing.’”¹¹

Qutb frequently reminds his readers of the very practical nature of his vision “to wipe out tyranny, and to introduce true freedom to mankind,” and he is quite clear that this may need to occur militarily:

The method of this religion is very practical….[It] uses the methods of preaching and persuasion for reforming ideas and beliefs; and it uses physical power and Jihaad for abolishing the organizations and authorities of the Jahili system which prevents people from reforming their ideas and beliefs but forces them to obey their erroneous ways and make them serve human lords instead of the Almighty Lord….[It] is a practical movement which progresses stage by stage, and at every stage it provides resources according to the practical needs of the situation and prepares the ground for the next one.¹²

Milestones therefore describes jihad as a world-dominating process moving inevitably from individual renewal, emerging to transform Muslim societies, and then surging into nations, eventually conforming peoples everywhere to Islamic law. Radicals since Sayyid Qutb, writes political and social science researcher Olivier Roy, “explicitly consider jihad a permanent and individual duty….This is probably the best criterion with which to draw a line between conservative neofundamentalists and radical ones….Among the few writings of Osama bin Laden, the definition of jihad as a permanent and personal duty holds a central place.”¹³

“GOD SENT US”—SUBMIT OR DIE!

What about Sura 2:256, the much-appealed-to verse in the Qur’an that states “there is no compulsion in religion”? It is often quoted as a proof text that Islam does not force anyone to convert, and even Qutb himself in Milestones tries to prove that. I do not wish to take issue with the beliefs of countless millions of sincere Muslims for whom Islam is a peaceful, nonviolent religion; but our concern here is Qutb’s militant extremism, and in that context his verdict about Sura 2:256 seems disingenuous. There is no space in this article to articulate the entire case, only to mention some conclusions I have reached.

Many scholars agree that Muslim conquests through war (military jihad) were, strictly speaking, not about making conversions but about spreading the totalitarian rule of Islamic law (shari‘a, see glossary).¹⁴ Sura 2:256, however, has not been able to prevent forced conversions to Islam or oppression and persecution of non-Muslims, including Jews and Christians, or enforced teaching of the Qur’an in the schools of the conquered.¹⁵ Muslims do not pleasantly broach such topics, for they are a stain on Islam that many Muslims would just as well forget, not unlike Christians would the Crusades and the Inquisition. Forced conversions, religious oppression, and so on, then, seem to result whenever the objective of Islam’s totality of life rule is strictly followed, and therefore it supersedes a passivist interpretation of Sura 2:256.

There is also the fuller context of the verse. The first half of Sura 2:256 reads, “There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error.” This could be interpreted to mean that for those who already see the light there is no need to make them believe, for the truth of Islam has become self-evident to them; they already believe.

Further, Qutb’s view of Islam as a totality for all of life includesIslam’srule overreligion.When his vanguard obeys its commission to implement that totality of life rule in a nation, it will therefore inevitably get around to ruling over everyone’s religious life. If the Taliban’s reign in Afghanistan was any indication, that rule will be harsh. Even if a conquered people are not forced to convert, many might choose to convert, as many did in the past, just to make life a bit easier for them—a sorry consolation prize from invaders who brought war to the people’s borders and proclaimed, “Submit or die!”

Qutb’s appeal to Sura 2:256 as a prohibition of forced conversion, therefore, begs too many questions to be believed. He is unapologetic that force will be necessary, and sanctioned, whenever preaching fails to change people’s behavior to conform to Islamic law. In fact, he does not see preaching as particularly effective in changing people’s behavior: “The establishing of the dominion of God on earth…and the bringing about of the enforcement of the Divine Law (Shari‘ah) and the abolition of man-made laws cannot be achieved only through preaching. Those who are opposing God’s creatures are not going to give up their power merely through preaching.”¹⁶

This attitude toward war is difficult for Western minds to understand from within their just-war tradition; but Qutb’s way of reasoning is not Western. It derives from his radical Islamic worldview, in which he turns the notion of war inside out. He states, “The Islamic Jihaad has no relationship to modern warfare, either in its causes or in the way in which it is conducted. The causes of Islamic Jihaad should be sought in the very nature of Islam and in its role in the world.”¹⁷ Qutb in fact sees jihad as “defensive war.” By this he means the right of his followers to attack those who resist efforts to implement the rule of political Islam in their lands. He explains,

If [Muslim warriors] had been asked the question, “Why are you fighting?” none would have answered, “My country is in danger; I am fighting for its defense” or “The Persians and the Romans have come upon us,” or, “We want to extend our dominion and want more spoils.” They would have answered…“God has sent us to bring anyone who wishes from servitude to men into the service of God alone, from the narrowness of this world into the vastness of this world and the Hereafter, and from the tyranny of religions into the justice of Islam.”¹⁸

War, then, for those who resist the totalitarian rule of Islam, becomes inevitable due to the submit-or-die ideology of the vanguard:

As we have seen, Islam reckons itself to be a worldwide religion and a universal religion; therefore it could not confine itself to the limits of Arabia, but naturally desired to spread over the whole world in every direction. However, it found itself opposed by political forces in the Persian and Roman Empires, which were its neighbors; these stood in the way of Islam….Therefore it followed that these political forces had to be destroyed….The Islamic conquests, then, were not wars of aggression….They were simply a means of getting rid of the material and political opposition that stood between the nations and the new concept that Islam brought with it. They were an “intellectual war” with respect to the people and a physical war with respect to the powers that held these people, and which denied them access to the new religion through the exercise of power and coercion….Three possibilities are placed before the people of a conquered country, one of which everyone must choose—Islam, the poll tax, or war….to refuse both Islam and the poll tax indicates clear insistence on maintaining the material forces that intervene between Islam and the minds of men. Hence this insistence must be removed by physical force, which is ultimately the only way.¹⁹

A people’s resistance to a totalitarian Islam that seeks to overthrow their state is viewed by Qutb as an attack on Muslims that prevents them from practicing their faith. This stunning euphemistic doublethink—turning the aggressors into those transgressed against—would have made the rulers of Orwell’s future state proud.

STRATEGIC OPTIONS, COMPETING GOALS

Sayyid Qutb’s totalitarian ideology represents but one movement in a terribly complex, high-stakes geopolitical drama that is gripping the West and the Muslim world, especially since the tragic events of 9/11.²⁰ It is forcing governments of all sorts to ask: What do Muslims really want in and for our nations? Qutb’s militant extremism in the hands of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda is but one of the answers coming back. It would be wrong, therefore, to stereotype the billion-plus Muslims worldwide as Qutbists, or to conclude, as some have, that Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or even the Taliban plan a return to the seventh century. Even the militant’s call to implement a true—or pure, or original—Islam does not represent a process of resocialization that is divorced from westernization and globalization. This is because Islam’s radicalization has occurred in the context of, not apart from, our modern world. Olivier Roy shows from his vast research that even the radicals’ backlash to westernization and globalization “does not mean a return to a ‘premodern’ society….It is more an attempt to ‘Islamise modernity.’”²¹

There are, then, different kinds of Islam, as there are different kinds of Christianity. For instance, whereas Qutbists seek sudden overthrow of the West through violence, some Muslims prefer what is often called incrementalism, a slow, long-term, nonviolent process of Islamization of a nation that may take generations.²² The process can sometimes be identified in the push by Muslims in England, France, Germany, and elsewhere for the introduction of Islamic laws into society. The West’s response to this push, so far, seems to follow the demands of the times and the dictates of certain ideologies, such as multiculturalism, political correctness, and, chiefly, democratic liberalism.²³

Other faithful Muslims prefer the objectives of the Muslim reformers.24 This growing and increasingly influential group includes scholars and writers who hold a wide array of views but who, in general, see Islam as a flexible, nondogmatic religion adaptable to the modern world. They would call themselves moderates, liberals, or progressives, and they generally hold to nonfundamentalist approaches to the Qur’an and shari‘a.

Much smaller groups are the secularists and the traditionalists. The secularists go so far as to see the shari‘a as an impediment to modernizing the Muslim world. Seizing on the idea of separation of mosque and state, this group typically sees the secular state as providing “the optimum freedom and protection to religion from the state, its autocrats, or the enemies of religion.”²⁵ The traditionalists “tend to adopt moderate, almost apolitical positions.”²⁶ “They have no specific agenda of political change,” writes Graham Fuller, former vice-chairman of the National Intelligence Council at the CIA, “[they] do not seek to shake up the system, and are generally accepting of existing political authority.”²⁷ In the sense that they are usually adaptive to new political realities to keep Islam alive, the Muslim traditionalists are not unlike the Christian Orthodox communities who have struggled, sometimes against great political odds, such as during the Soviet communist era, to act as a force of religious cohesion, perseverance, and preservation in their nations.

Further complicating matters, one finds overlapping concerns, interests, positions, and doctrines among these different groups. Even after a careful reading of many nonfundamentalist Muslim sources, ambiguity may remain around the question: “What’s your ultimate goal for the West? What do you really want?” The self-described liberal Muslim Dr. Muqtedar Khan is a case in point. Professor Khan, an Indian Muslim, teaches political science at the University of Delaware and is in great demand as a speaker in the United States. He believes that his liberal voice offers an alternative to that of fundamentalist Islam, and he is bold to declare it, such as he did in a stunning article that he titled “Memo to Mr. bin Laden: Go to hell!”²⁸ Even so, one finds some ambiguity where one would like clarity. In American Muslims, where Khan calls the faithful to become more active in the American political process, he writes, “The task of not only articulating but also manifesting a moderate, peaceful, tolerant, inclusive, compassionate and moral model of Islam falls on the American Muslim community.”²⁹ That sounds pretty conclusive, and even the book’s title is instructive, enlisting the word “American” as an adjective before “Muslim,” rather than the other way around. In an article titled “Who Are Moderate Muslims?” however, Khan writes, “I believe that moderate Muslims are different from militant Muslims even though both of them advocate the establishment of societies whose organizing principle is Islam.”³⁰ This is a very revealing statement. It seems to suggest a desire for an America ultimately shaped by Islam; yet, perhaps Khan’s desire is similar to that of many Christians who simply seek a godlier America.³¹

Answers to basic questions like these are a vital part of the honest dialogue that remains between Muslims, Jews, Christians, and Western secularists who want to make the world politically and socially safer for communities, families, and nations. They see things differently but seek nonmartial alternatives for sorting out their differences. The great task here is to find what the Christian wisdom tradition would call “mutual ground” answers, and they will be found only through exercising heights of imagination previously unknown to us. One thing seems clear: this dialogue is one in which the submit-or-die ideologues cannot participate.

Glossary for Part Two

Shari’a: Islam’s body of sacred law, which is based on the Qur’an and the traditions (see below). Shari‘a deals with religious, legal, and economic issues, such as principles of worship, justice, rights, and penalties. The shari‘a’s premises are similar to that of Jewish law in the Bible—that God is the ultimate sanctioner of laws, human law ought to embody God’s will, and there is no distinction between a religious and a secular offense against the law. “For Muslims also, God as the supreme and transcendent Sovereign has revealed His Laws through His prophets. Shari‘a is the concrete embodiment of the Divine Will, and in its most universal sense it embraces the whole of creation…and is to be implemented to regulate society and the actions of its members rather than [as in Western jurisprudence] society dictating what laws should be” (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, The Heart of Islam: Enduring Values for Humanity [New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2002], 117). Some believe that, because different kinds of Muslim scholarship (e.g., reformed, liberal) are offering varied ways to interpret the shari‘a, it makes more sense today to talk not about a monolithic body of Islamic law but rather about Islamic laws.

Traditions: Qutb’s name for the Hadiths and the Sunnah. The Hadiths, meaning, roughly “news” or “reports,” are the teachings and actions of the prophet Muhammad that are not in the Qur’an but are said to have been recorded by his close companions and family. The Sunnah, meaning “custom,” is the writings surrounding the habits and religious practices of Muhammad, also recorded by his close friends and family, and regarded as ideal Islamic norms. The Hadith and the Sunnah are large bodies of writings that together regulate a wide array of issues and are enshrined, along with the teachings of the Qur’an, in the shari‘a.

notes

1. Sayyid Qutb, Islam: The Religion of the Future (Salimiah, Kuwait: International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, n.d.), chaps. 3–4. Qutb affirmed certain critical assessments of Western civilization offered by English philosopher Bertrand Russell, scientist Alexis Carrell, and President Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles, but he believed that their analyses failed to penetrate to the heart of the problem.

2. Ibid., 95–96.

3. Sayyid Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, trans. John B. Hardie, rev. trans. Hamid Algar (rev. ed., Oneonta, NY: Islamic Publications International, 2000), 38–43, 113.

4. Ibid., 41.

5. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus, Syria: Dar-al-Ilm, n.d.), 93.

6. Ibid., 82–83.

7. Ibid, 9.

8. Ibid., 9, 11–12.

9. Feisal Abdul Rauf, What’s Right with Islam (New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 2004), 135–38.

10. Qutb, Milestones, 9.

11. Ibid., 7–11.

12. Ibid., 55–56.

13. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 41–42.

14. This point is acknowledged even by conservative analyst Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 44.

15. See the scholarly, panoramic books of Bat Ye’or, The Decline of Eastern Christianity under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), and Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).

16. Qutb, Milestones, 58–59.

17. Ibid., 57.

18. Ibid., 70–71.

19. Qutb, Social Justice in Islam, 198–200.

20. Charles Strohmer, “Wise Foreign Relations,” Christian Reflection Journal, A Series in Faith and Ethics: Christianity and Islam Issue (Baylor University) (2005): 28–35.

21. Roy, 19–20.

22. For discussions of this, see, for example, Patrick Sookhdeo, “The Islamization of Europe,” Briefing no. 38, August 11, 2005, Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity, http://www.isic-centre.org; or Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis (Madison-Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005).

23. The British government, for instance, which had Europe’s most liberal immigration polices toward Muslim radicals, has been forced to revise them since the July 7, 2005, bombings on the London underground.

24. See Charles Strohmer, “Change Agents: The Voices of Muslim Reformers,” Christian Century, August 9, 2005, 24–27; and Charles Strohmer, “Muslim Women on Islamic Reform,” Sojourners, October, 2004, 44–46.

25. Graham E. Fuller, The Future of Political Islam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 60.

26. Pipes, 125.

27. Fuller, 47–48.

28. This was published in the Washington Post (Feb. 16, 2003), the Arab News (Saudi Arabia), the Times of Central Asia, and many other outlets.

29. M. A. Muqtedar Khan, American Muslims: Bridging Faith and Freedom (Beltsville, MD: Amana Publications, 2002), 3.

30. Muqtedar Khan, “Who Are Moderate Muslims?” October 5, 2002, IJTIHAD, http://www.ijtihad.org/moderatemuslims.htm.

31. In my conversations, to date, with Dr. Khan, I have not had this particular ambiguity of his resolved in my mind.

SYNOPSIS

Rarely reported by the American media, an ideological civil war is occurring in Islam between scholars of the emerging Muslim reform movement and radicals who promote militant interpretations of Islam. This is a battle for the hearts and minds of mainstream Muslims in the Middle East. The reformers see Islam as a flexible, nondogmatic religion adaptable to the modern world, and some even call for the separation of mosque and state.¹ The militant radicals want to squeeze followers of Islam into a tight-fisted sectarian army at war with the entire “infidel” world. Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda epitomize the latter view. This two-part article examines the militant side of this ideological war in the life and writings of Sayyid Qutb, the twentieth-century Egyptian “martyr” whose theological/political dogma shapes bin Laden’s worldview, justifies violence against those who resist it, and seeks a totalitarian rule of the world.

In the West he has been regarded as “the philosopher of Islamic terror.”² In the Muslim world, he is remembered as “the martyred scholar of Islam.”³ His views help explain terrorist acts such as the Madrid train bombings (March 2004), the suicide bombings in the London underground (July 2005), and the incendiary conduct of 19 men aboard four aircraft on September 11, 2001. He increasingly is recognized as the foremost thinker behind the worldview of Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri (bin Laden’s “lieutenant”), Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (deceased leader of terrorist operations in Iraq), and members of al-Qaeda. His militant views inform many other jihadi (see glossary) leaders and aid the flow of disaffected Muslim youths from the Arab street into what Jordanian political columnist Rami Khouri calls the “basement,” where terrorists are born. His name is Sayyid Qutb, a formidable Egyptian radical who was imprisoned for his views and eventually executed by hanging.

It has often been assumed that Osama bin Laden is a Wahhabi (see glossary) because he was born and educated in Saudi Arabia, where Wahhabi doctrine dictates religious and educational life and social mores, and indoctrinates students from an early age in extreme anti-American and anti-Jewish values. This is not the full picture, however; for although bin Laden certainly is steeped in Saudi Wahhabism, he and other frontline terrorists, including members of al-Qaeda, are also unquestionably Qutbists, that is, adherents to Qutb’s views. Their worldview has been shaped by both sources. In particular, their basic theological/political ideology derives from Qutb’s views as a kind of mission statement that justifies the existence and operations of their organized network (al-Qaeda means “base” or “organization”).

QUTB’S LIFE AND INFLUENCES

Born in 1906 and educated in Cairo, Egypt, the Sunni Arab Sayyid Qutb received degrees in teacher training and education in 1929 and 1933, during a period when he acquired some Western leanings and was more a man of letters than a political activist. He had interests in poetry and journalism and published literary criticism and short stories. From 1933 to 1949, he served the Egyptian ministry of education as a teacher and school inspector. Gilles Kepel, who is perhaps the first prominent Western scholar to publish extensively about Qutb (1984), writes that during the 1930s Qutb increasingly objected to British influence in Egypt and deplored Jewish immigration to Palestine. By 1945, “the principal subject matter of his articles [had] shifted from literature to nationalism, political events, and social problems,”⁴ and in 1948 he condemned the founding of the Jewish state.

American Secularism and Christianity

Qutb’s changing opinion of the West veered in a much more radical direction when he reached American soil in 1948. During his two-plus years studying and traveling in America, Qutb grew to hate the United States for its materialism, sexual immorality, and the freedom it allowed to women. America’s separation of church and state was repugnant to him, and he detested what he considered the prejudiced way the press reported overseas Muslim events. He thought that America’s Christian churches, at least those he visited, were not following Jesus’ teachings. For instance, while studying at Colorado State College of Education, in Greeley, he attended a local church service and, afterward, a church dance. Bruce Lincoln, a scholar of Middle East Studies, writes, “Qutb was not disturbed simply by the eroticism he took to be indecorous and improper.” For Qutb, the room “became a confusion of feet and legs; arms twisting around hips; lips met; chests pressed together.” More troubling, however, and “analytically most revealing [to Qutb], was the enabling condition of this offensive spectacle: the disconnection between the preceding ‘religious’ service and the ‘social’ event that followed.”⁵ By the end of his trip, Qutb had concluded that Christianity had failed in America because it had separated religious life from political and social life. This was antithetical to the whole-life Islam that Qutb now preached.

The Muslim Brotherhood

After returning to Egypt, in the early 1950s, Qutb joined the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, which had become that nation’s leading political alternative, founded in 1928 by Egyptian-born Hasan al-Banna (1906–1949). In the 1940s, the Brotherhood began espousing political violence as a means of social transformation. During the 1950s, Brotherhood members were arrested for sedition and several Brotherhood leaders were executed by hanging after being accused of the failed 1954 assassination attempt on Egyptian prime minister Gamal Abdel Nasser. Many of the group’s key figures fled to Saudi Arabia, where they found warm camaraderie with state-sponsored Wahhabism and where they were put to good use. Essayist and political critic Paul Berman writes,

The Saudi princes were determined to keep their own country on a path of pure adherence to Saudi Arabia’s antique and rigid version of Islam; and Egypt’s intellectuals, with their stores of Koranic knowledge, had much to offer. The Egyptian exiles took over professional chairs in Saudi universities. And their impact was large. Qutb’s younger brother, Muhammad Qutb, a distinguished scholar in his own right, fled to Saudi Arabia and became a professor of Islamic studies. One of his students was Osama bin Laden.⁶

After joining the Brotherhood, Qutb quickly gained status as its leading ideologue and became the editor of its radical newspaper. In 1954 he was jailed with others who were accused of attempting to overthrow Nasser’s government and was sentenced to hard labor in what some have called Nasser’s concentration camps, where torture was not uncommon. Except for two short periods, Qutb spent nearly 12 years in prison, where he studied and wrote many books, including most of his 30-volume commentary on the Qur’an, In the Shade of the Qur’an. He was executed by the Egyptian government in 1966.

Al-Banna’s Uniquely Islamic Worldview

Brotherhood founder Hasan al-Banna had a decisive, shaping influence on Sayyid Qutb’s worldview. The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century had seen the birth of the movement now known as political Islam, which preached a return to the totality of Islam for all of life, including nonseparation of religion and government. Al-Banna had become its most influential proponent after studying the life of Muhammad and his companions and examining the original vision and first decades of Islam. Islamic scholar Noah Feldman writes that for al-Banna,

Islam was not merely a faith but a comprehensive worldview that covered the whole field of human existence.… It provided a blueprint for a just society, organized along Islamic principles.… The mature Banna’s Islam was therefore both political and fundamentalist: political in refusing to be relegated to the sphere of the private or the personal, and fundamentalist in the technical sense that it went back to the most basic, fundamental elements of Islam—the divine message of the Qur’an and the sayings and actions of the Prophet and his followers.⁷

Al-Banna popularized the term Islamic as an adjective to distinguish his worldview from Western and other worldviews, including nationalist Muslim ones. The terms Islamism and Islamist also arose from al-Banna’s system of thought to describe “not just Muslims but people who see Islam as a comprehensive political, spiritual, and personal worldview defined in opposition to all that is non-Islamic.”⁸

In 1949, when Qutb was in America, al-Banna was murdered by the Egyptian secret police. His sudden death devastated the Brotherhood and further radicalized Qutb. By the time of Nasser’s rule (1954–1958), the Brotherhood had reorganized as a major political player in Egypt, with chapters springing up outside Egypt, a process that Feldman believes “was the single most important institutional element in the diffusion of political Islam.”⁹

In his writings, Qutb developed al-Banna’s Islamic worldview in ways that further radicalized the Brotherhood and kindled the intellectual struggle in the Muslim world between those who desire peaceable relations with the West and those who desire a world without the West. Qutb’s many books, most of which still have been published only in Arabic, have had a major influence since the 1960s on Muslim youths as they have come of age. His radical doctrines have inspired and emboldened countless Muslim dissidents, who have had both time and opportunity to grow more politicized, organized, and clandestine. Today, through several English translations of Qutb’s seminal works, we in the West find passage into a concise, black and white, absolutist worldview, one that has empowered bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, members of al-Qaeda, and many other frontline terrorists.

QUTB’S TOTALITARIAN WORLDVIEW

There is a philosophical and theological intelligence behind Qutb’s criticisms of, and prescriptions for, whatever aspect of life was in his sights. Berman noted, “Qutb is not shallow. Qutb is deep.”¹⁰ Besides his extensive knowledge of Islam and the Qur’an (he is said to have memorized the Qur’an in its entirety by age 10), Qutb was familiar with Greek philosophy, Judaism, Christian theology, church history, and church councils. He studied Constantinianism (i.e., the formal alliance of church and state first employed by the Roman emperor Constantine) and the Renaissance and Reformation periods and criticized as “lamentable” the intellectual climate and institutionalism of modern Western Europe. He mounted significant criticisms of American life, liberal democracy, communism, socialism, Marxism, fascism, Nazism, and capitalism and was conversant with the ideas of many Western thinkers, politicians, and Christian religious figures of his day. He developed a simple, straightforward style of writing to communicate his way of thinking about Islam—Islamism—which appealed to Muslim youths. It was very different from the “complex rhetoric” of the Islamic scholars, writes Kepel. “Qutb spoke directly to his readers, using the modern idiom to get simple points across.”¹¹

In Terror and Liberalism, Berman draws convincingly from twentieth-century Western history and literature to show that, in principle, Qutb’s worldview is not unprecedented when seen in the light of other totalitarian enemies of democratic liberalism, especially fascism and communism. These were “irrational, authoritarian, and insanely murderous, a politics of mass mobilization for unachievable ends.”¹² For Berman, therefore, the “Terror War,” as he calls it, is not really new, but rather is just another totalitarian ideology with legs and arms. Berman arrived at this conclusion after studying all of Qutb’s writings that he could find that were published in English. Regarding three English volumes of In the Shade of the Qur’an, Berman writes, “Qutb explains that a proper understanding of the Koran can be achieved only in an atmosphere of serious struggle, and only by someone who is engaged in a ferocious campaign for Islam, not by someone at ease in his chair. The Koran, he observes, does not merely offer a body of knowledge, to be plucked at will, as if from a tree. The Koran offers a way to live.”¹³

Within Qutb’s totalitarian worldview, Islam, or at least Qutb’s view of Islam, is the totality. Qutb’s doctrine of the sovereignty of God is the theological starting point for this notion. Berman observes, “Every page of In the Shade of the Qur’an can be seen as a commentary on the single affirmation, ‘There is no God but Allah.’ Every new theme and topic offered Qutb a fresh opportunity to demonstrate that nature, man, and man’s obligations come from a single source, which is God. And Islam is the acknowledgment of that one overwhelming reality.”¹⁴ This doctrine also drives what I call Qutb’s radical view of history and of history’s fatal flaw. This view provides the theological/political wedge that bin Laden and al-Qaeda use for dividing the world into antithetical camps. A short account follows.

QUTB’S RADICAL VIEW OF HISTORY AND OF ITS FATAL FLAW

Whether he looked east or west, or at the Soviet bloc, or even at the contemporary Muslim world, Qutb saw an unbearable crisis: “Everywhere man was ill at ease and alienated from his own nature.”¹⁵ It was all sliding downward, as Qutb put it in Islam: The Religion of the Future, employing a powerful image that is reminiscent of Leonard Cohen’s postmodern appraisal of a pending future in which “the blizzard of the world has crossed the threshold and it has overturned the order of the soul,” therefore, things will “slide in all directions.”¹⁶

History’s Fatal Flaw

Starting from his conclusion about the sorry state of his contemporary world, Qutb swept back through time seeking to identify what went wrong. He found it in Jewish history, specifically in what he perceived as Judaism’s eventual reduction of God’s total reign from one that rules over all of life (in the Law of Moses) to one that rules over ceremonial and individual moral concerns only. Qutb viewed this as fatal for history because it produced the secular/sacred split in life. He analyzes the effects of this reductionism extensively in his books. Using a language and a way of reasoning not unlike that of Christian philosophy and worldview analysis today, he speaks in terms of various organizing principles functioning as “gods” that rule and shape people’s beliefs and behavior in different areas of life. In Qutb’s view, Judaism had lost its founding vision of God’s rule over the totality of life. God, in Qutb’s estimation, ruled only Jewish religious and private life because, over time, gods from pagan nations had wheedled in to organize the other aspects of Jewish life (e.g., social, economic, political), and the Jews thereby became idolatrous, embracing polytheism while claiming to be monotheists. Having identified history’s fatal flaw, Qutb now had a starting point for his radical view of history.

Jesus, Qutb believed, was a true messenger of God sent to restore aspects of Jewish life and practice back under God’s rule, but because of His untimely death and the persecution and scattering of His disciples, neither Judaism nor Christianity was able to recover in any systemic sense the original unitary vision of the Mosaic Law. Then came a worse historical disaster: the official conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity in the fourth century. In his books, Qutb ranges through the domestic life, social policies, and foreign relations of the Holy Roman Empire, lambasting church councils, condemning the Crusades, and interpreting hundreds of passages in the Qur’an to justify his radical criticisms. Christianity during this era, for Qutb, had become lost to idolatries. He shows some sympathy for the faithful Christians who were horrified by Roman immorality, imperialist debaucheries, and pagan influences but who could do little about them, although he had no patience for the monasticism that arose to counter those tendencies. It is tellingly ironic, however, that the man who preached nonseparation of religion and government scandalized Christianity for its matrimony with government.

The Arrival of Islam

History, as Qutb saw it, had been sliding quickly to its nadir when, at last, the arrival of Islam in the seventh century fully implemented God’s unitary message. That totality was in place only for a few decades, however, before, in Qutb’s view, “the Muslim world, having seized the leadership of mankind, lost its grip on Islamic principles, and went into decline,” even though “the Islamic Empire (which Qutb declined to describe as an empire: he preferred ‘community’) continued to spread.”¹⁷ In his writings, Qutb explains what he perceives as the internal and external reasons for the empire’s decline, beginning not long after Muhammad’s death in 632 AD. A few words about Qutb’s understanding of Muhammad’s religious/political methodology and the first decades of Islam are necessary here in order for us to understand Qutb’s proposed remediation of history’s fatal flaw.

The Rise of Islam

In AD 622, after preaching monotheism with some success for more than a decade among the polytheistic tribes in and around Mecca, Muhammad traveled 280 miles north to Medina, a city of well-established Jewish settlers and polytheistic Arabs. The city was wild and unruly, without a stable government, and Muhammad had accepted the city fathers’ invitation to become the arbiter of Medina’s social and political disputes. “Islam was useful to them,” writes acclaimed Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, “not so much as a new religion, but as a system that could give them security and discipline. Unlike the Meccans, they had no vested interest in paganism and could accept the religious aspect of Islam on approval, provided it satisfied their political and social needs. The full religious conversion of the Medinese did not take effect until much later.”¹⁸

It was in Medina that the fledgling faith of Islam became politicized, marking a turning point for Muhammad and for those whom Muslim history calls his companions. “In Mecca,” writes Lewis, “Muhammad was a private citizen, in Medina the chief magistrate of a community. In Mecca he had had to limit himself to more or less passive opposition to the existing order, in Medina he governed. In Mecca he preached Islam, in Medina he was able to practice. The change necessarily effected the character, activities and doctrines of Muhammad and of Islam itself.”¹⁹ In particular, the Medina transformation created a rudimentary political Islam that first ruled Medina, then fought and subdued the Meccans, and then spread into Central Asia, across North Africa, and into Spain during an era of devastating wars known as “the age of the conquests.” Muslim armies conquered cities, provinces, lands, and all sorts of Jewish, Christian, Arab, and pagan tribes that were then part of the ruling Byzantine and Persian empires of the Near and Middle East.

The emerging and new Arab empire considered itself next in the succession of great empires, from Persian to Greek to Roman to Byzantine to Islamic; but how was the new empire to rule its conquered but widespread and diverse lands? The empire would set up state rule around the religious caliphate (i.e., the central ruling institution of Islam until the twentieth century, see glossary), a process begun in earnest in the mid to late-seventh century. Through this historical process, Muslim religion and politics became fused and instituted as a unity that Westerners today find hard to imagine. It is, however, as normal for Islamists to believe in the uniting of mosque and state as it is for secularists to believe in the separation of church and state. The facts of history, then, show that Muhammad and his companions established a unitary vision of Islamic religion and politics and, with each Muslim conquest, spread that fusion of religious rule over all of life.

The Fall of Islam

Qutb’s interpretation of history, however, is that despite the rule of the caliphate, Islam, after the seventh century and as it spread, did not adhere to the unitary Islamic vision of Muhammad and his companions. Seeing only a few brief historical exceptions, Qutb concludes that Islam continually fell prey to idolatry, allowing false gods to rule many aspects of life, as Judaism and Christianity had done by not complying with God’s vision for all of life. The world by Qutb’s day, therefore, already had well more than a thousand years to become a complete write-off. His conclusion follows logically from his premise: when an original unitary vision of life goes bad, all of life, including religion, ends up down the drain.

In Islam: The Religion of the Future, Qutb describes the secular/sacred split—the fatal flaw—as having reached such a pitch of idolatry by his day that it had become “the hideous schizophrenia.” It was “leaving its destructive traces in Europe, and from there to the whole world wherever Western views, institutions, and ways of life have conquered other human societies. Once people deviated from God’s system, they had to continue following fatuous ideologies of their own invention, leading predictably to their miserable state wherein individuals suffer the terrible consequences of their ideological shortcomings, moaning from the pain inflicted on them by their fellowmen.”²⁰ Worse still for Qutb was “their ineffectiveness in ridding themselves of their abominable manmade Hell.”²¹ No matter how people and nations had tried, they had failed.

QUTB’S SOLUTION: SANCTIFICATION THEN STRUGGLE

The only solution, accordingly, was a return to the original unitary vision, and the secret for achieving this lay in following an unorthodox interpretation of Islam that Qutb had read into the first decades. “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership,” Qutb writes in Milestones, “[Muhammad] called people to God through preaching, without fighting…and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate [from Mecca to Medina], and later permission was given to fight.”²²

In Muhammad’s journey from religious prophet to political ruler to military conqueror, Qutb posited two nonnegotiable attitudes and phases to his radical view of history and its remediation. The Meccan period was a time when Muhammad held his warriors in check under intensive study of the Qur’an only. It was a time when Allah cleansed them inwardly and they received “initial stages of training” from “that one source of guidance,” for only after having achieved spiritual purity would victory be granted when they went out to conquer and subdue.²³ That is how Qutb read the early decades. He saw every political failure to establish Islam’s totalitarian rule as the result of premature fighting, that is, of struggle before sanctification.

Berman believes that by offering a completely Muslim way of viewing history and its remediation, Qutb had put his finger on a universal experience within the modern Muslim world: “the prevailing feeling of being two instead of one, the pain of living in two worlds at once.”²⁴ Qutb’s totalitarian view was indeed revolutionary for a generation of twentieth-century Muslim fundamentalists who saw in Western religion, philosophy, theology, law, culture, and politics not the redemption but the end of history.

Qutb, however, was now also shaking his fist at modern Christianity. Muslim lands were, of course, suffering because, according to Qutb, European and American imperialism was forcing the hideous schizophrenia on them externally; but Muslims could fix blame “not on anything vague such as modernity or human nature,” writes Berman, “but on something specific and identifiable—namely Christianity, and its doleful influence on modern culture, as exported by the power of the Western countries. Qutb trembled in fear at the hideous schizophrenia. He thought the crisis was enormous and incomparably profound. Deep currents of theological and ecclesiastical deviation, two thousand years of Christian error, were bearing that crisis atop the roiling waves. And the tide was rushing forward, across the Muslim world.”²⁵

The Muslim Vanguard

Backed into a corner that he perceived to be of world-historical significance, Qutb took a stand, writing voluminously from prison and calling into being a new breed of Muslim leadership, a militant vanguard, to stand with him, backs to the wall, to fight against the flood of idolatry by pioneering the unitary vision of Islam. Bin Laden, Zawahiri, Zarqawi, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and other militant Islamists, such as al-Qaeda sleeper-cell operatives, would consider themselves among this vanguard.

Osama bin Laden, however, born in 1957, never met Sayyid Qutb. Qutb’s influence on bin Laden was therefore indirect, from a number of sources. One, already noted, was from his university classes under Muhammad Qutb. There also were at least two other key figures. One was the Palestinian Qutbist Abdullah Azzam, who was an influential representative of the Palestinian arm of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1960s and 1970s and later became bin Laden’s ideological mentor, a close association that lasted for many years. Bin Laden was one of Azzam’s university students in Saudi Arabia and the two later became partnership leaders in Afghanistan as they fought the Soviets.²⁶

The other figure was the Pakistani intellectual Mawlana Mawdudi (sometimes “Maududi”). Kepel writes that the theoretical basis for the Islamist movement itself “was devised…by the ideologists Mawdudi in Pakistan, Qutb in Egypt, and Khomeini in Iran.… Mawdudi and Qutb thought along similar lines and exercised influence among the Sunni Muslims, [while] Khomeini operated within the framework of the Shiites.”²⁷ When bin Laden lived and traveled in Pakistan among the jihadi-salafists (see glossary) around Peshawar in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he would have been with followers of Mawdudi (who died in 1979), whose extremist writings, in which “religion was turned into an ideology of political struggle,”²⁸ were well established throughout the region.

Bin Ladenism, a totalitarianism that many Westerners find so perplexing (evidenced in the common question, “Why do they hate us?”), thus did not arise in a social and political vacuum, nor is it the result of mere irrational fanatics acting willy-nilly. The methodologies and goals of the political and religious actors it produces are sometimeslabeled“irrational” byWestern analysts, but nevertheless it is something of a coherent and calculated worldview, one that is based on a particular set of religious, political, and historical assumptions that lie at the heart of Sayyid Qutb’s writings. Part two of this series will consider the ramifications of Qutb’s militant political theology, which energizes bin Laden and the al-Qaeda vanguard.

Glossary for Part One

Caliphate: The central ruling institution of Islamic religion and politics that began after the death of Muhammad, in which mosque and state were one and the caliph (the official title of the political successor to Muhammad), considered the rightful ruler of Islam, was its head. The institution over time provided an organizing authority over the many diverse lands and peoples of the new empire. It was abolished in the aftermath of World War I by Mustafa Kemal, who called himself Ataturk (Father of the Turks) and who established in Turkey the first secular government in a Muslim society. Osama bin Laden and others want to see the restoration of a strict caliphate over Muslim lands.

Jihadi: A militant religious extremist who practices jihad (“holy war”). The designation “jihadi groups” has emerged to describe “the cults of Mullah Muhammad Omar of the Taliban, Osama bin Laden of al Qaeda, and Juma Namangani of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan” (Ahmed Rashid, The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia [New York: Penguin, 2003], 3).

Salafism: A sect of Islam that advocates a return to the traditions of Islam’s devout ancestors, who were thought to embody Islam’s doctrinal purity. “In the eyes of the militants…, salafists were those who understood the injunctions of the sacred texts in their most literal, traditional sense…. The salafists were the real fundamentalists of Islam; they were hostile to any and all innovation, which they condemned as mere human interpretation” (Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam, 219–20).

Shiite: One of the two religious branches of Islam that emerged in the late seventh century following the great schism over who should be the rightful caliph. The Shia (or Shiites) claim descent from the family of Muhammad and believe that only descendents of that family should have been the caliphs. They represent about 15 percent of Islam, with many in Iraq and Iran where they greatly outnumber the Sunni. In Iraq they hold the reigns of political power for the first time in an Arab country (the Sunni ruled Iraq previously). They differ from the Sunni only in the political realm.

Sunni: One of the two religious branches of Islam that emerged in the late-seventh century following the great schism over who should be the rightful caliph. To be accepted by the Sunnis, caliphs needed to be religious authorities, but they did not have to be descended from Muhammad’s family. They are far-and-away the Muslim majority in the world. They differ from the Shia only in the political realm.

Wahhabism: A very strict sect of Islam founded in the eighteenth century by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in reaction to what he perceived as Islam’s adulterated original vision. It grew as a result of a religious alliance that it formed in the eighteenth century with the Saud monarchy of Saudi Arabia. Wahhabism in the twentieth century became a vast extremist fundamentalist education system, financed by Saudi petrol dollars, that built mosques and schools everywhere across Saudi Arabia. (Its widespread national influence is analogous to that of the U.S. public-school system.) It teaches strict implementation of Islamic laws in religious, political, legal, moral, and private life and is shockingly anti-America and anti-Israel. Wahhabist doctrine is also spread by many of the 1500 mosques that Saudi public funds have built around the world. Since 9/11, Washington and other capitals have pressured the Saudi monarchy to reign in the Wahhabi clerics and deradicalize that educational system. Results are mixed.

notes

1. Charles Strohmer, “Change Agents: The Voices of Muslim Reformers,” Christian Century, August 9, 2005; and Charles Strohmer, “Muslim Women on Islamic Reform,” Sojourners, October, 2004.

2. Paul Berman, “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,” New York Times Magazine, March 23, 2003, 26.

3. Zafar Bangash, “Remembering Sayyid Qutb, An Islamic Intellectual of Rare Insight and Integrity” (for the 23rd anniversary of Qutb’s death, August 1999), Muslimedia.com, http://www.muslimedia.com/archives/features99/qutb.htm.

4. Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and the Pharaoh (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1986), 40.

5. Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors: Thinking about Religion after September 11 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 4.

6. Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 63.

7. Noah Feldman, After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 41–42.

8. Ibid., 42.

9. Ibid., 43.

10. Berman, “The Philosopher of Islamic Terror,” 26.

11. Gilles Kepel, Jihad: The Trail of Political Islam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 26.

12. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 23.

13. Ibid., 65.

14. Ibid., 66.

15. Ibid., 68.

16. Leonard Cohen, “The Future,” More Best of Leonard Cohen (Sony Music, 1997).

17. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 74.

18. Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History, rev. ed. (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1966), 41.

19. Ibid.

20. Sayyid Qutb, Islam: The Religion of the Future (Salimiah, Kuwait: International Islamic Federation of Student Organizations, n.d.), 35.

21. Ibid.

22. Sayyid Qutb, Milestones (Damascus, Syria: Dar-al-Ilm, n.d.), 53.

23. Ibid., chap. 1.

24. Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 76.

25. Ibid.

26. Kepel, Jihad, 144–47, 314–15.

27. Ibid., 5, 23.

28. Ibid., 34.

“In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets at many times and in various ways, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe. The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven” (Heb.1:1‑3).²

According to Islam, the Qur’an is not only credible; it is God’s only uncorrupted revelation. Thus, according to Muslim scholars, if it is to be compared with anything in Christianity it is to be compared with Christ rather than the Bible. In truth, however, the Bible can be demonstrated to be divine rather than human in origin. The same cannot be said for the Qur’an. Moreover, unlike the Bible, the Qur’an is replete with faulty ethics and factual errors.

First, unlike the Qur’an, the Bible is replete with prophecies that could not have been fulfilled through chance, good guessing, or deliberate deceit. Surprisingly, the predictive nature of many Bible passages was once a popular argument among liberals against the reliability of the Bible. Critics argued that various passages were written later than the biblical texts indicated because they recounted events that happened sometimes hundreds of years after they supposedly were written. They concluded that subsequent to the events, literary editors went back and “doctored” the original nonpredictive texts. But this is simply wrong. Careful research affirms the predictive accuracy of the Scriptures. Since Christ is the culminating theme of the Old Testament and the Living Word of the New Testament, it should not surprise us that prophecies regarding Him outnumber all others. Many of these prophesies would have been impossible for Jesus to deliberately conspire to fulfill—such as His descent from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (Gen.12:3;17:19; Matt.1:1‑2; Acts3:25); His birth in Bethlehem (Micah5:2; Matt.2:1‑6); His crucifixion with criminals (Isa.53:12; Matt.27:38; Luke22:37); the piercing of His hands and feet on the cross (Ps.22:16; John20:25); the soldiers gambling for His clothes (Ps.22:18; Matt.27:35); the piercing of His side (Zech.12:10; John19:34); the fact that His bones were not broken at His death (Ps.34:20; John19:33–37); and His burial among the rich (Isa.53:9; Matt.27:57‑60).

In sharp contrast, predictive prophecies demonstrating the divine origin of the Qur’an are conspicuous by their absence. While the Qur’an contains a number of self-fulfilling prophecies such as Muhammad’s prediction that he would return to Mecca (Sura48:27), this is very different from the kinds of prophecies outlined above. Other prophecies such as Muhammad’s prediction that the Romans would defeat the Persians at Issus (Sura30:2‑4) are equally underwhelming. Unlike the biblical examples presented above this prophecy is not fulfilled in the far future and thus can be easily explained through good guessing or an accurate apprehension of prevailing military conditions.

Furthermore, the Qur’an is replete with questionable ethics—particularly when it comes to the equality of women. For example, in Sura4:3 Muhammad allegedly received a revelation from God allowing men to “marry women of your choice, two, three, or four.” Ironically, in Sura33:50 Muhammad receives a divine sanction to marry “any believing woman who dedicates her soul to the Prophet if the Prophet wishes to wed her.” Thus while other men were only permitted to marry up to four wives, Allah provided Muhammad with a divine exception for his marriage to at least 12 women—including Aishah, whom he married at the tender age of 11 (see the Life of Muhammad by Muhammad Husayn Haykal). Also troubling is the fact that the Qur’an allows men to “beat” (lightly) their wives in order that they might “return to obedience” (Sura4:34). When we compare the personal morality of Muhammad in the Qur’an with that of Jesus in the Bible, the difference is remarkable. The Qur’an exhorts Muhammad to ask “forgiveness for thy fault” (Sura40:55). Conversely, Christ’s ethics with regard to every aspect of life—including his treatment of women—was so unimpeachable that He could rightly ask: “Can any of you prove me guilty of sin?” (John8:46, 2Cor.5:21, 1John3:5).

Finally, unlike the Bible the Qur’an is riddled with factual errors. A classic case in point involves the Qur’an’s denial of Christ’s crucifixion. This denial, chronicled in Sura4:157, is explicit and emphatic: “They killed him not, nor crucified him, but so it was made to appear to them…for of a surety they killed him not.” In reality, however, the fatal suffering of Jesus Christ as recounted in the New Testament is one of the most well-established facts of ancient history. Even in today’s modern age of scientific enlightenment, there is a virtual consensus among New Testament scholars, both conservative and liberal, that Jesus died on a Roman cross. Recent archaeological discoveries not only dramatically corroborate the Bible’s description of Roman crucifixion but authenticate the biblical details surrounding the trail that led to the fatal torment of Jesus Christ—including the Pilate Stone and the burial grounds of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over the religious trials of Christ. These discoveries have been widely acclaimed as a compelling affirmation of biblical history. Not only so but the earliest Jewish response to the death and burial of Jesus Christ presupposes the reality of the empty tomb. Instead of denying that the tomb was empty, the antagonists of Christ accused His disciples of stealing the body.

One final point should be made. The Qur’anic denial of Christ’s crucifixion has led to a host of other errors as well. From a Muslim perspective, Jesus was never crucified and, thus, never resurrected. Instead, in Islam, God made someone look like Jesus and the look-alike was mistakenly crucified in His place. The notion that Judas was made to look like Jesus has recently been popularized in Muslim circles by a late medieval invention titled The Gospel of Barnabas.

In short, the distance between the Muslim Qur’an and the Christian Scriptures is the distance of infinity. Not only does the prophetic prowess of the Bible elevate it far above the holy books of other religions, but as new archeological nuggets are uncovered the trustworthiness of Scripture as well as the unreliability of pretenders is further highlighted. Faulty ethics and factual errors demonstrate that the Qur’an is devoid of divine sanction. In sharp distinction, ethics and factual evidence demonstrate that the Bible is divine rather than human in origin.

— Hank Hanegraaff

NOTES

1. Adapted from Hank Hanegraaff, The Bible Answer Book (Nashville: J. Countryman, 2004).

2. All Scripture quotations are from the New International Version.

For further study, see Norman L. Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, Answering Islam (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2002).

“The Christian faith has done more harm than good to the human race.” When critics of Christianity make such a claim, they typically will cite the Crusades,¹ along with the Inquisition, as supporting evidence. Muslims, atheists, and New Age believers alike, among others, make full use of the Crusades in their efforts to dismiss Christian truth claims.

In this column I will briefly consider (in concurrence with this issue’s cover article by Daniel Hoffman, p.12) the claims Muslims make about the Crusades. In next issue’s column I will look in greater depth at the way holy wars in general are used by social and religious liberals to discredit all “fundamentalist” approaches to religion, including evangelical Christianity.

Many Muslims and Muslim sympathizers view Islamic jihad or “holy war”² against the West as justifiable self-defense. They believe that Western Christians launched holy war against Muslims first (in the form of the Crusades), and that they continue to wage war against Muslims to the present day.³

The 2005 movie Kingdom of Heaven, currently available on DVD and premiering on the premium movie channel Cinemax as I write, promotes such a view of the Crusades. On PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, film reviewer Mary Alice Williams observed that “in it, the Muslims are the good guys—noble and proud. The Christians are the bad guys—irredeemably avaricious and blood-thirsty but for three whom history has recorded.”⁴

As Daniel Hoffman acknowledges, the Crusades ultimately fell seriously short of accepted Christian standards for a just war, despite the fact that they were undertaken for largely noble reasons. These dark annals of church history are fair game should Hollywood choose to shine a light on them. It is not fair game, however, to distort the facts, capitalizing on the public’s ignorance of history, all for the purpose of striking a low blow at Christianity. Hofmann convincingly demonstrates that this is exactly what Kingdom of Heaven does.

Andrew G. Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad (Prometheus, 2005), puts the matter into historical perspective:

From its earliest inception, through the present,jihad has been central to the thought and writings of prominent Muslim theologians and jurists. The precepts and regulations elucidated in the 7th through 9th centuries are immutable in the Muslim theological-juridical system, and they have remained essentially unchallenged by the majority of contemporary Muslims. The jihad is intrinsic to the sacred Muslim texts, including the divine Qur’anic revelation itself, whereas the Crusades were circumscribed historical events subjected to (ongoing and meaningful) criticism by Christians themselves. Unlike the espousal of jihad in the Qur’an, the constituent texts of Christianity, the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, do not contain a form fruste [sic] institutionalization of the Crusades. The Bible sanctions the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan, a limited domain; it does not sanction a permanent war to submit all the nations of humanity to a uniform code of religious law….The Crusades as an historical phenomenon were a reaction to events resulting from over 450 years of previous jihad campaigns.⁵

The fact that the New Testament in particular never enjoins a holy war needs to be considered much more carefully than it often is. This we shall do in the next From the Editor.

— Elliot Miller

NOTES

1. The Crusades were military expeditions that were undertaken by European Christians in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims.

2. This definition of jihad is disputed by some Muslims (see, e.g., http://www.submission.org/muhammed/ jihad.html), and it is true that the term can also refer to a nonphysical struggle against evil, but the use of jihad to mean literal warfare is firmly established in both historic and contemporary Islam. (See Douglas E. Streusand, “What Does Jihad Mean?” Middle East Quarterly, September 1997, http://www.ict.org.il/ articles/jihad.htm.)

3. See, e.g., A. Aly, “Holy War (Jihad),” http:// home.att.net/~a.f.aly/jihad.htm.

4. Mary Alice Williams, “Film Review: Kingdom of Heaven,” Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, episode no. 836, PBS, May 6, 2005, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/ religionandethics/week836/review.html.

5. Andrew G. Bostom, “Jihad Begot the Crusades (part 1),” The American Thinker, May 4, 2005, http://www.americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=4467.

SYNOPSIS

Kingdom of Heaven, a recent film set in the era of the Crusades, unfortunately perpetuates the false view that fanatical Christians brought war to an otherwise peaceful Muslim world. The film’s hero, Balian of Ibelin (played by Orlando Bloom) essentially represents a Hollywood version of what a Crusader should have been like: brave, concerned about the poor and underprivileged, tolerant, and not much interested in holy places in Jerusalem or in Christian doctrine—except to reject the extremism apparently caused by focusing on either one.

Real Crusaders were quite different, in that they were highly motivated by their Christian beliefs. By the late eleventh century, however, some of these beliefs had moved away from basic biblical and early church teachings. It was not their belief in absolute truth per se, but rather this mix of error with truth, along with the pressures of war, that led to some of the widely cited Crusader atrocities. Any proper attempt to evaluate the Crusades needs to measure their stated goals and actions against pertinent biblical criteria and the historical context at the time. Such an evaluation shows that the Crusades began with several noble and legitimate motives, but that these motives degenerated in practice at times. Even at their worst, however, the Crusades (only the first four are briefly considered) were little different than other wars conducted by Muslims before, during, and after the Crusades.

The recent film Kingdom of Heaven shows conflicts between Muslims and Christians in the twelfth century after the Second and before the Third Crusade, and dramatically culminates with the short siege and fall of Jerusalem to the Muslims in 1187. It is an amazing Hollywood version of the period, but it certainly is not factual history.

Among other things, it portrays Balian of Ibelin (played by Orlando Bloom) as a twenty-first-century, tolerant, sensitive hero who gained some kind of victory in the failed defense of Jerusalem, when, in fact, nearly all Christians at the time considered this loss to be a tremendous disaster.

More significantly, the film’s portrayal of Reynald of Chatillon, the French knight who controlled Karak castle and raided caravans that were going to Mecca, suggests that his actions were typical of most Crusaders who were trying to spread Christianity. The implication is that men like Reynald brought war to an otherwise peaceful, even idyllic, Muslim area. This cinematic image falls short of the truth in important ways, because wars were widespread throughout the Muslim world long before the Crusaders arrived and the Crusaders did not seek to convert Muslims by force.¹

Such misconceptions, nevertheless, have contributed to the situation today in which “the Crusades” have become virtually synonymous with supposed Christian cruelty and intolerance. The Crusades actually were motivated in part by the desire of Christians in the West to help fellow Christians in the East. Those who went to the East suffered and often died in their attempts to help. Even if those attempts were misguided, unnecessary, or unsuccessful, there was little cruelty or intolerance in that aspect of the Crusades. Of course, the Crusades did involve warfare—often French, Norman, or other Christians against Turkish, Arab, or other Muslims—and that warfare brought death and destruction to all sides involved, as does war in any era. The Crusading era also included regrettable cases in which Christians and Muslims engaged in criminal, sinful, and wicked behavior apart from the fighting itself.

How can people begin to understand and evaluate this complex historical mix correctly? I believe that to conduct a proper evaluation of it, people should begin with the biblical and theological criteria for a legitimate war that were in use at the time, and then should consider whether the Crusades were conducted in harmony with such Christian teachings and with their own stated goals.

A JUST WAR?

Church fathers such as Ambrose and Augustine argued that such biblical texts as John18:26; Romans13:3‑4; and 1Peter2:13‑14 provided justification for governments to use force, including war, as “an agent to bring punishment on the wrongdoer” (Rom.13:4 NIV). These and other church leaders since the fourth century approved of Christians serving in the military and participating in war, at least under some circumstances, based on such passages as Matthew8:5‑7, Luke3:14;6:15;14:31; and Acts10‑11. Various other views had existed among Christians, to be sure. The spectrum ranged from pacifism or nonresistance to offensive, preventive wars. By the time of the Crusades, however, many Christian writers and thinkers accepted a middle position in this spectrum, which was often called the just-war view. According to Augustine, this view argued that a war was legitimate if it (1)had a just cause (primarily that of defense); (2)had a just intention; (3)was a last resort; (4)was declared by a legal government or proper authority; (5)had limited objectives; (6)was fought with appropriate and proportionate means; and (7)ensured the protection of noncombatants and included proper treatment of the wounded and of prisoners.² The first five criteria relate primarily to legitimate reasons for going to war in the first place while the last two provide standards for the proper conduct of those who are engaged in war. They can be applied fairly well to the stated motives for the Crusades and to the actual conduct of the Crusaders.

REASONS FOR THE CRUSADES

It is widely known that the Crusades were launched in November of 1095 when Pope Urban II called for a campaign to free the Holy Land from the control of the “Saracens” or “infidels” at the church council at Clermont in France. It is often wrongly assumed that Urban wanted to increase his own power, or that of the Roman Catholic Church, by ordering Christians to fight; however, the real motivations and circumstances behind Urban’s action are less widely known.

To Defend Christians in the East

Christians in the Middle East and Europe had needed to defend themselves against aggressive Muslim incursions ever since Islam began in the seventh century. Muslim groups, from the seventh through the tenth century, conquered Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, Spain, and many other areas that Christians had inhabited since the early church era. More immediately preceding the Crusades, in the late eleventh century (1070), the Seljuk Turks, who promoted the majority Sunni branch of Islam, overran much of the Near East and captured Jerusalem from the Fatimid dynasty, a Shi’a Islam group that had controlled Egypt and parts of the Middle East since the early tenth century. In 1071, these same Turks defeated the Byzantines in what today is eastern Turkey, and subsequently moved west into territory that was inhabited by Greek Christians.

This loss of territory and the continuing threat posed by the Muslim Turks prompted the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus (who ruled from 1081–1118), to request defensive aid from Christians in the West. This plea, in the form of a letter from Alexius, was what sparked Urban’s speech at Clermont. The text of his speech, unfortunately, has not been preserved. One eyewitness later mentioned, however, that Urban specifically cited the plight of the Byzantine Christians: “Your brethren who live to the east are in urgent need of your help…the Turks and the Arabs have attacked them and conquered…as far west as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont.”³

Various Turks looted, raped, and pillaged in Christian and Muslim areas in the eastern part of Turkey that comprised the Asia Minor peninsula rather indiscriminately between 1071 and 1095.⁴ The threat to Eastern Christians in Byzantine territory in the 1090s, therefore, was real. Defending from these Turkish attacks would fit many of the criteria of a just war, but, unfortunately, the hordes of peasants and the unruly groups of professional soldiers that later showed up at Constantinople proved to be little help for Alexius or for Byzantine Christians.

To Protect Pilgrims and Churches in the Holy Land

Also behind Urban’s action at Clermont was the harassment of pilgrims from the West in Asia Minor and Palestine, which started after the Seljuk conquests in the 1070s. The earlier Fatimid rulers of Egypt generally had placed few restrictions on travel to the holy sites in Palestine for Christians, and pilgrimages had become popular in the eleventh century. Securing continued safe passage of Christians was important to Urban: “Let the great suffering of those who desire to go to the holy places stir you up. Think of those who made pilgrimage across the sea!…Remember, I pray, the thousands who have perished vile deaths [in route], and strive for the holy places from which the beginnings of your faith have come.”⁵

The worst problem in the eleventh century for travelers from the West to Palestine, as well as Christians who were already in the East, was what actually had occurred some years prior to the Turkish conquests. The Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim (c.996–1021) severely persecuted Christians and ordered the destruction of many churches throughout Egypt and Palestine. About 30,000 churches eventually were looted or burned, and equally large numbers of Christians and Jews were killed or forcibly converted to Islam.⁶ Al-Hakim even ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. His men demolished the sacred tomb and chiseled away much of the rock of Golgotha. After his disappearance and presumed murder in 1021, however, relatively peaceful relations resumed between the Fatimid rulers and the Christians in Egypt and Palestine. Subsequent Byzantine emperors financed the rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and pilgrims came again, in increasing numbers, until the Seljuk attacks at the end of the eleventh century.⁷

Urban, or those who heard him, may have remembered al-Hakim’s actions and associated them with the more recent Seljuk attacks. One of the more sensational accounts says that Urban mentioned “an accursed race,” that was “utterly alienated from God,” which had depopulated the territory around Jerusalem “by the sword, pillage and fire” and “destroyed the churches of God or appropriated them for the rites of its own religion.”⁸ This description seems to match the actions of al-Hakim better than those of the Turks, but in either case, whether systematically or haphazardly, churches and Christians—as well as territory controlled by Christian rulers—had been attacked by aggressive Islamic forces in the years just before the First Crusade.

To Export Troublemakers?

Urban probably had other motives as well. He seems to have hoped to reduce warfare among Christians in Europe. Recently Christianized but still warlike groups, including former Vikings and Magyars, often were fighting, and Urban probably wanted to redirect their belligerent actions: “Let those who have been accustomed unjustly to wage private warfare against the faithful now go against the infidels.…Let those who have been fighting against their brothers and relatives now fight in a proper way against the barbarians [emphasis added].”⁹ On the whole, however, Urban made it clear that the sanctioned aggression was to defend Christians in the East, and to secure other limited objectives including safety for pilgrims who were traveling to the holy sites and for those already in the area. These goals were largely compatible with just-war teachings.

BAD THEOLOGY, GOOD MOTIVATION

Urban’s call was widely heeded, probably more widely than he expected, because of the strongly religious character of western Europe in the Middle Ages. In that setting, he found the perfect way to motivate Christians to go to war, even if it meant death, by promising complete forgiveness of sins without the normal process of penance: “All who die by the way…or in battle against the pagans, shall have immediate remission of sins. This I grant them through the power of God with which I am vested.”¹⁰ If this was not enough, he seemed to pledge heaven itself to those who merely attempted the task: “Undertake this journey for the remission of your sins, with the assurance of the imperishable glory of the kingdom of heaven.”¹¹ The decrees from the Council of Clermont confirmed these promises: “Whoever, out of pure devotion and not for the purpose of gaining honor or money, shall go to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God, let that journey be counted in lieu of all penance.”¹²

Crusade expert Jonathan Riley-Smith says Urban’s action was unprecedented; “Never before had a holy war been proclaimed by a pope on Christ’s behalf, the participants in which were treated as pilgrims, took vows, and enjoyed indulgences.”¹³ These indulgences for fighting were not just for the First Crusade, but became a feature of all later Crusades. For example, Bernard, the powerful speaker and most prominent proponent of the Second Crusade, also told people throughout France that those willing to fight would “likewise obtain the indulgence of all thou hast confessed with a contrite heart.”¹⁴ The response to these kinds of promises was amazing. Those who heard Urban at Clermont reported that the crowd broke into repeated shouts of “Deus le volt!” (“God wills it!”).¹⁵

It is highly doubtful biblically, however, that God willed men or women to seek spiritual forgiveness through external, often violent, actions. Of course, the misconception implicit in the Kingdom of Heaven movie, that the Crusaders were charged with establishing a physical “kingdom of heaven” in or around Jerusalem apart from the actual second coming of Christ, does not reflect New Testament teaching (see, e.g., Matt.5:38–44;18:2–4;26:52; John3:3–7,18:36; Rev.21). In any event, Urban did not authorize a war against Islam in general, and did not call for the conversion of Muslims by force. The violence sanctioned to support Byzantine Christians and gain control of Jerusalem, “the navel of the world,”¹⁶ undoubtedly would involve killing, but this extension of Scripture was still far different than the command found in the Qur’an to “strike off the heads” of infidels (Sura8:12).¹⁷

THE FIRST CRUSADE (1095–99)

Within a few months of Urban’s call, without planning or proper provisions, more than 100,000 religiously motivated peasants, poorer soldiers, and churchmen from western Europe began to march—and things began to go wrong. Badly misguided mobs, apparently thinking that there was little reason to march thousands of miles to fight infidels when some lived much closer to home, attacked Jews in the German cities of Spier, Worms, Cologne, Mainz, and elsewhere. Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues were looted and destroyed, and hundreds of Jews, even some who had fled to Christian homes or to the residences of local bishops for protection, were killed. Many Christians, including Pope Urban and the Holy Roman Emperor, condemned these attacks. Most of the people involved in these anti-Jewish actions eventually died along the way or were killed fighting fellow Christians in Hungary and never even reached Constantinople. Some thoughtful Christians wondered if God had judged them for their reprehensible behavior.¹⁸

The Peasants’ Crusade

Other peasant Crusaders—mainly French, German, and Italian—got a little farther along the way to Jerusalem, but were no more effective in advancing the cause of Christ than the early German groups. Inspired and led in part by a poor but charismatic monk, Peter the Hermit, tens of thousands of men, women, and children eventually reached Constantinople in 1096. Since they had subsisted by begging, foraging, and pillaging along the way, Alexius was quick to provide transportation for them across the Bosporus strait to get them away from the city and into mostly Turkish territory as soon as possible. Without experienced or effective leaders, petty rivalries and stresses soon led various contingents further to abandon the biblical principle that Christians should lay down their lives for their brothers (John15:13)—and their raiding soon degenerated into the rape and slaughter of some local residents, mostly Greek Christians.

When the Turks did move against these “Christian” marauders, most were killed, but many were enslaved or forcibly converted to Islam.¹⁹ It is hard to see any link in principle between the activities of these peasant Crusaders and Urban’s stated goals, or with the precepts of a properly conducted just war.

The Princes’ Crusade

The first official Crusade was led by various French, German, and Italian nobles—princes and barons. These Crusaders were well-equipped professional soldiers, and, unlike the people in the Peasants’ Crusade, they arrived at Constantinople without much difficulty, in late 1096 and early 1097.

Led by such men as Raymond IV, count of Toulouse; Hugh of Vermandois, the brother of Philip I, the king of France; and Adhemar, the bishop of Le Puy and official papal legate, these Crusaders clearly represented legal governments or authorities. Personal rivalries among the various leaders and sporadic clashes between the Crusaders and Alexius’s own troops around Constantinople, however, caused difficulties. Moreover, as a condition for providing them with transportation and aid, Alexius expected the Crusade leaders to pledge loyalty to him and to promise that whatever territory they might win back from the Turks would belong to the Byzantine Empire. Most leaders made a pledge and were taken across the Bosporus into Turkish territory, but hard feelings already were present. This resentment soon intensified into an open split with Alexius after the Crusaders besieged Nicaea, the Turkish capital in the region. Alexius managed to get the town to surrender to him when the Crusaders were on the verge of capturing it themselves. The Crusaders then felt betrayed.²⁰

After a couple of minor victories against Turkish forces in western Asia Minor, the Crusaders, essentially on their own politically, began a long and torturous march across Turkey toward Jerusalem. The hardships and deaths on this journey, along with the amazing preservation and extraordinary military success of those who survived—as evidenced by their capture of Antioch in 1098 and their defeat of the forces sent to relieve the city—transformed the nature and goals of the Crusade, according to Riley-Smith. After the papal representative, bishop Adhemar, died, and several other leaders died or left, the remaining forces were convinced that God was their personal and direct leader, and that they were His warriors and champions. Their warfare was now explicitly deemed holy and just, and those who died fighting were thought to be martyrs.²¹

The Siege of Jerusalem

The surviving Crusaders who finally reached Jerusalem in May of 1099 were equally convinced that God would deliver the city and the Holy Sepulcher to them. They didn’t know or care that the Fatimids already had taken back the city from the Turks during the previous year. An acceptable deal for free access to the city and its holy sites presumably could have been reached with these Muslims since they had generally practiced such a policy when they controlled the city before 1070. Continued war to gain unrestricted pilgrim access to Jerusalem—a major goal of the Crusades—was not justified, since it was not now a last resort; nevertheless, when its inhabitants did not surrender, the Crusaders besieged the city. Expecting a miracle, the Crusaders at one point marched barefoot around the city like the Israelites at Jericho, but the Jerusalem walls did not fall. Equally providential from the Crusader viewpoint, however, were siege towers, catapults, and a battering ram (which was built using equipment supplied from Genoese and English ships that had made a timely landing at Jaffa on the coast) that eventually led to a breach in the Jerusalem defenses on July15,1099.²²

The crusading army, as any victorious army at the time would have, killed many of the defenders and sacked the city, but scholars debate the scope of the destruction they wreaked. Most historians now discount as hyperbole accounts of “rivers of blood” and “blood rising to the bridles of their horses.”²³ The Crusaders certainly did kill Muslim defenders of the city that had fled to the al-Aqsa mosque, however, and they burned a synagogue with some Jews inside. Among the Jews probably were men who had helped in the defense of the city against the Crusaders, but neither action would be legitimate based on just-war principles (even if the losing defenders expected no better).²⁴

French Crusade specialist Jean Richard concludes, however, that the killing in Jerusalem was not systematic. First, he argues that Hebrew letters discovered recently in a Jewish manuscript repository at Cairo show that some Jews were escorted to the seaport at Ascalon where they were ransomed by friends who came from Egypt. Richard observes that the letters also note with surprise that the Franks, the generic name for the Crusaders, respected women in Jerusalem. Next, he states that many Muslims simply were expelled from the city and not killed following the Crusader victory. Some of these Muslims apparently went to Damascus, since the Muslim leader Saladin later made an attempt to locate their descendants there and bring them back after he recaptured Jerusalem in 1187. Finally, Richard points out that most Christians had been expelled from Jerusalem by the Fatimid governor before the Crusaders took the city.²⁵ It is possible that some of these Christians were killed in the general chaos, but careless descriptions of Crusaders indiscriminately killing thousands of Muslims, Christians, and Jews—men, women, and children—are not supported by the best evidence.²⁶

After a celebration at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and the defeat of a Fatimid army that belatedly had attempted to relieve Jerusalem, many of the surviving Crusaders went home. They had not come to colonize or to gain wealth, but to fulfill holy vows. Their actions clearly were not holy when they moved away from biblical teachings, but even in such cases they were little different in war than their contemporaries.²⁷

THE SECOND CRUSADE (1147–49)

The Second Crusade was launched to recapture the Christian stronghold of Edessa in Syria that had fallen to the Muslims in 1144. The Armenian Christian city had in essence married into the conflict at the time of the First Crusade and its loss seemed to mark a resurgence of Muslim aggression that needed to be countered. The results were dismal. Several German armies were annihilated in Turkey long before reaching Syria. Those Crusader forces that reached Palestine safely by sea, foolishly, treacherously, and unsuccessfully attacked their one significant Muslim ally in the region: the city of Damascus. That failed attack had the unintended consequence of strengthening the hard-line Muslims and preventing future accommodations with the remaining Franks.²⁸

SALADIN AND THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

One of the most interesting characters in the whole Crusader era was Saladin (c.1137–1193), the Muslim leader who finally united various factions, decisively defeated the Crusaders at the Horns of Hattin near the Sea of Galilee on July4,1187, and recaptured Jerusalem shortly afterwards. He was known for his chivalry and his military skill. The film Kingdom of Heaven portrays him very positively, as have many authors in the West since the English Romantic writer, Sir Walter Scott, wrote a flattering but now historically discredited book about him in the early nineteenth century. Saladin, prior to this, largely had been ignored in Muslim history according to crusade historian Jonathan Philips.²⁹

Saladin, ironically, might never have been able to forge his decisive and victorious coalition in 1187 without the negative stimulus from the vicious and unprincipled Reynald. Operating from Karak in the years before Hattin, Reynald violated truces, tortured and killed Muslim captives, and at one point even tried to attack Mecca. His actions, though certainly conditioned by his own long imprisonment under Muslims, were still inexcusable and united Muslims against him and the Franks he seemed to represent. Christian survivors of Hattin probably were glad to be rid of Reynald when Saladin personally killed him after the battle, essentially as depicted in the Kingdom of Heaven film.³⁰

On the other hand, such treacherous characters did not exist only among the Franks. The later Muslim sultan of Egypt, Baybars (c.1223–77), for example, broke pledges, desecrated churches, and frequently poisoned or otherwise killed Christian civilians and Muslim enemies. The most infamous case was his sack of Antioch where the carnage horrified even the Muslim chroniclers. Baybars, moreover, sent his own taunting account of the massacres to the absent Christian ruler of Antioch, specifically detailing the killing of priests, deacons, monks, and many others in the city.³¹

THE THIRD (1189–92) AND FOURTH (1202–04) CRUSADES

The Third Crusade was designed to recapture Jerusalem after its fall to Saladin. It is often considered to have been the most chivalrous and romantic Crusade since it featured Richard “the Lionhearted” and the gracious Saladin. Both men were good military leaders, but after a few battles, political pressures and other concerns eventually led them to negotiate rather than continue fighting. Richard secured rights for pilgrims from the West to travel freely to Jerusalem and other holy sites throughout the region—a key reason for the Crusades in the first place—and the Franks retained control of several important coastal cities. Saladin and his successors, though, kept Jerusalem.³² While disappointing to many Christians in the era, the compromise generally fits with just-war theory.

The Fourth Crusade was far different. By nearly any measure it was a disaster, since it ended not at Jerusalem, but with the Crusaders sacking the Christian controlled city of Constantinople in 1204. The circumstances that led to this debacle hardly matter, as it was clearly not a just war. It was simply war; while little different in practice than many others, it nevertheless contributed quite negatively to subsequent views of the Crusades—and indirectly provided stimulus for the revisionism of the modern Kingdom of Heaven.

notes

1. See Thomas F. Madden, “The Real History of the Crusades,” Crisis Magazine 20.4 (April 2002), reprinted online at ChristianityToday.com, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/ 2005/118/52.0.html. For some possible exceptions to this general rule, see Jonathan Riley-Smith, The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986),109–11.

2. See Arthur F. Holmes, “The Just War,” in War: Four Christian Views, ed. Robert G. Clouse (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 120–30; and Norman L. Geisler, Christian Ethics: Options and Issues (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 1989),215–37.

3. Fulcher of Chartes, “Gesta Francorum Jerusalem Expugnantium” in Bongars, “Gesta Dei per Francos,” 1:382–83 in A Source Book for Medieval History, trans. and ed. Oliver J. Thatcher and Edgar Holmes McNeal (New York: Scribners, 1905),515–16. Fulcher and the other medieval sources for Urban’s speech cited in this article are available online at “Urban II (1088-1099): Speech at Council of Clermont, 1095, Five versions of the Speech,” Internet Medieval Sourcebook (Fordham University), http://www.fordham.edu/ halsall/source/urban2-5vers.html.

4. Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1951),1:64–79.

5. Guibert de Nogent, “Historia quae dicitur Gesta Dei per Francos,” in August C. Krey, The First Crusade: The Accounts of Eyewitnesses and Participants (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1921),36–40.

6. Runciman, 1:35–37.

7. Ibid.

8. Robert the Monk, “Historia Hierosolymitana,” in Dana C. Munro, “Urban and the Crusaders,” in Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1895),1:5–8.

9. Fulcher of Chartres, in A Source Book for Medieval History, 516–17. Balderic of Dol recorded Urban saying, “You should shudder at raising a violent hand against Christians; it is less wicked to brandish the sword against Saracens. It is the only warfare that is righteous, for it is charity to risk your life for your brothers” (quoted in Krey,35–36).

10. Fulcher of Chartres, in A Source Book for Medieval History, 516–17.

11. Robert the Monk, in Munro, 1:6–7.

12. Canon 2, quoted in The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Indulgences” (by W. H. Kent), http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07783a.htm, accessed October22,2005.

13. Riley-Smith, 30.

14. Epistles 322 and 362, quoted in The Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. “Indulgences.”

15. Robert the Monk, in Munro, 1:6–7. See also Runciman, 1:108.

16. Robert the Monk, in Munro, 1:6–7.

17. Norman L. Geisler and Abdul Saleeb, “Understanding and Reaching Muslims (Part Two),” Christian Research Journal24,4 (2002),29–31; http://www.equip.org/free/ DM809.htm.

18. Runciman, 1:137–41.

19. Ibid., 1:121–33.

20. Ibid., 1:161–71.

21. Riley-Smith, 92–119.

22. Runciman, 1:282–87; Jean Richard, The Crusades c. 1071—c. 1291, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),63–66.

23. Richard, 66.

24. Ibid. See also Runciman, 1:286–87, and William Hamblin and Thomas Madden, “Cross Purposes,” interview by Peter Robinson, Uncommon Knowledge, April 22, 2002, transcript available online at http://www.uncommonknowledge.org/700/706.html.

25. Richard, 66.

26. Former president Bill Clinton in 2001 gave a careless and inaccurate description of the sack of Jerusalem, according to crusade author Thomas F. Madden. (“Clinton’s Folly,” American Outlook [Fall 2001], http://www.americanoutlook.org/index.cfm?fuseaction= article_detail&id=1474.)

27. Richard, 67–72, 474–82.

28. Ibid., 155–69.

29. Cited in Charlotte Edwardes, “Ridley Scott’s New Crusades Film ‘Panders to Osama Bin Laden,’” News Telegraph, January1,2004, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/01/18/wcrus18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/01/18/ixworld.html.

30. Richard Warren Field, “Kingdom of Heaven: Sorting Fact from Fiction,” RichardWarrenField.com, http://www.richardwarrenfield.com/essay029.htm.

31. Runciman, 3:315–26; Richard, 416–19.

32. Runciman, 3:34–75.

SYNOPSIS

Islamic apologetics denies the accuracy and harmony of the Christian Scriptures, as well as the main Christian doctrines that conflict with Islamic theology, namely, the Trinity and the deity of Christ. To answer these claims, Christian apologists must first recognize the role of authority in the Islamic argument, particularly the ultimate authority of the Qur’an. Second, they must expose the hidden assumptions behind the majority of Muslim objections to the Trinity and the deity of Christ. They must challenge the assumption of Unitarianism (that God can be only one person) and they must explain the doctrine of the Trinity in light of Islamic misconceptions. This involves explaining that the Trinity is inalterably monotheistic and that the real issue is whether the statement that “God is one” means God is one in both being and person or one only in being. Muslim apologists will use the Bible to point out alleged contradictions in the doctrine, but Christian apologists can provide proper exegetical responses that support the consistent testimony of the Word of God to the truth of the Trinity.

Fielding questions from the audience is always the hardest part. As I wrapped up my first debate with a Muslim apologist, I wondered what would be coming my direction as a long line of men dressed in Muslim garb formed behind the single audience microphone. I did not have to wait long. The first questioner went on for at least three minutes before finally getting to his point: “Was Jesus a white man or a black man?” My answer took substantially less time than his question: “He was a Palestinian Jew, actually, as the Bible says.”

The next questioner was more to the point:

Muslim: “You say Jesus is our Creator?”

White: “Yes.”

Muslim: “And you say Jesus was a man and walked the earth?”

White: “Yes, the Word become flesh.”

Muslim: “And he was a real human being, you say?”

White: “Yes, fully man.”

Muslim: “So this means Jesus ate food, and that would mean it would pass through his body and be eliminated, and since that is unholy, then how could he be God?”

When answering an audience’s questions I never know what to expect, but I surely had not prepared for that particular objection. (My answer was straightforward, focusing on the questioner’s mistaken idea that natural bodily functions are unholy.) This encounter illustrates one of the main problems we have in communicating the truth of the Trinity (and the attendant issue of the deity of Christ) to Muslims: the issues we are most prepared for often do not carry nearly the weight with Muslims that we would like, and the topics that cause them the greatest difficulties can throw us a real apologetic curve.

WESTERN ISLAMIC APOLOGISTS

Whereas historic, conservative Islamic belief is consistent between Muslims in Islamic nations and those in Western democracies, the methods of Islamic apologetics differ. Muslims in Islamic nations can use the sword (or in modern parlance, the gun) to effectively “win the debate” against systems that would conflict with any element of Islamic belief. Many Islamic nations fine, imprison, torture, or even execute those who are “guilty” of criticizing Muhammad, the Qur’an, or basic Islamic beliefs. These punishments are consistent with Qur’anic teaching: “The punishment for those who wage war against God and His Prophet, and perpetrate disorders in the land, is to kill or hang them, or have a hand on one side and a foot on the other cut off, or banish them from the land. Such is their disgrace in the world, and in the Hereafter their doom shall be dreadful. But those who repent before they are subdued should know that God is forgiving and kind” (Sura 5:33–34). “So, fight them till all opposition ends, and obedience is wholly God’s” (Sura 8:39).

The propagation of other beliefs, especially beliefs that contradict the Islamic faith (such as historic, biblical Christianity), is viewed in the same light. To declare that Jesus Christ rose from the dead and that salvation is found only through Him is to deny the heart and soul of the Islamic confession that Muhammad is Allah’s prophet and the Qur’an is God’s Word. When Islam takes power in a culture, apologetics comes to an end, and force becomes the final argument.

In Western culture, however, there is still an opportunity for dialogue and debate. Islamic apologists are forced to stand on equal ground with others and give a reasoned case, both for their positive confession of Muhammad as a prophet and their negative denial of the historic Christian views of Christ’s person and work. Muslim apologists in the United States encounter a pluralistic society that still maintains many distinctively Christian features (even if they have been, in the vast majority of citizens, divorced from the divine truths upon which they were initially built). As a result, conservative Islam has developed a form of apologetics that presents a number of unexpected twists and turns. Part of this apologetic focuses upon a defense of Muhammad and the Qur’an, but in most situations their apologetic is an anti-Christian polemic aimed at the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and His resurrection. The following study will equip Christians with answers to this particular apologetic challenge.

THE KEY ISSUES

What are the key issues that give form and shape to the Islamic apologetic challenge? (I will first list them and then address each in turn.)

Authority: Although Muslim apologists cite Scripture, they deny its ultimate authority and consistency, and they place the Qur’an as the highest authority over all matters.

Assumption of Unitarianism: Behind their arguments against the Trinity is the often undefended assumption of Unitarianism. This assumption must be exposed and challenged.

Arguments from Eisegesis: Despite questioning the veracity of Scripture, Muslim apologists are quick to quote from it, though they rarely do so with sound knowledge of its historical and grammatical context.

Authority

The doctrine of the Trinity is a biblical doctrine.¹ It is derived first and foremost from Scripture alone and all of Scripture. When Islamic apologists engage in a critique of this doctrine, they do not share Christianity’s foundational commitment to the authority and accuracy of Scripture that gave rise to the doctrine in the first place. Christians, therefore, must explain why we believe the Bible to be the Word of God and why we believe it has been accurately handed down to us today (the subject of the previous article in this series in the Journal).² Even if a conversation about the Trinity does not lead to issues of the accuracy of the text of Scripture, the fact that we must allow all of Scripture to speak must be emphasized from the start; for as we are about to see, the primary issue with the Muslim denial of the key truths of the Trinity flows from their unwillingness to allow the Bible to define its own theology. Instead, Islamic categories are pressed upon the biblical text, resulting in serious errors.

It should also be remembered that while the Qur’an directly addresses the doctrine of the Trinity, it misrepresents the doctrine. Since this is so, and since the Qur’an is held in the highest position of authority for the Muslim, the Christian often faces a real difficulty. Many Muslims will not allow the historic understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity to define the conversation. At times we face the strange situation of being told that what we are defending is not really the Trinity at all! We are told that the doctrine has been changed by Christians down through the ages to make it easier to defend. What does the Qur’an say about this important topic? Note these words:

They are truly infidels who say: “God is the Christ, son of Mary.” But the Christ had only said: “O children of Israel, worship God who is my Lord and your Lord.” Whosoever associates a compeer with God, will have Paradise denied to him by God, and his abode shall be Hell; and the sinners will have none to help them. Disbelievers are they surely who say: “God is the third of the trinity;” but there is no god other than God the one. And if they do not desist from saying what they say, then indeed those among them who persist in disbelief will suffer painful punishment.… The Christ, son of Mary, was but an apostle, and many apostles had (come and) gone before him; and his mother was a woman of truth. They both ate the (same) food (as men). Behold, how We show men clear signs, and behold, how they wander astray!… Tell them: “O people of the Book, do not overstep the bounds of truth in your beliefs, and follow not the wishes of a people who had erred before, and led many others astray, and wandered away from the right path.” (Sura 5:72–73, 75, 77)3

A fair reading of this text tells us that a person who believes in the deity of Christ is an “infidel.” The text, furthermore, assumes, but does not prove, Unitarianism (i.e., it denies the distinction of the divine persons and assumes that the being of God subsists in only one person). It puts words in Christ’s mouth that may be only loosely drawn from John 20:17. Though the author of the Qur’an intended them to be a denial of the Trinity, these words, however, are a denial only of various forms of modalism,⁴ not of the historic doctrine of the Trinity itself.

This text also raises the serious issue of shirk — the concept of associating anything or anyone with God. Islam teaches that belief in the Trinity involves one in the sin of shirk, and for this reason Muslims truly believe we are enticing them to commit the sin of idolatry. This section of the Qur’an shows how serious this is in Islamic belief, for it dooms believers in the Trinity to hell itself, with the added declaration that none can help them. There is no forgiveness for such a serious sin.

This claim, however, is evidence that the Qur’an is not an inspired document, for it is clear that its author did not understand the doctrine of the Trinity, which already had been established clearly and taught for centuries.⁵ To say “God is a third of the Trinity” is to completely misrepresent the doctrine. The Father is not a third of God, nor is the Son, nor is the Spirit. Each is fully God. God’s being cannot be divided. It is simple (i.e., not compound, not made up of parts) and indivisible. The author of the Qur’an suggested that Trinitarians deny this. A person would indeed be a “disbeliever” for saying, “God is a third of the Trinity,” but they would also be disbelieving the doctrine of the Trinity to say so! The author of the Qur’an obviously misunderstood the doctrine of the Trinity. The Muslim scripture plainly represents belief in the Trinity as belief in the divisibility of the being of God, for how else could this involve one in the sin of shirk — of associating something or someone with God?

The following phrase expresses biblical monotheism: There is no god other than God the one. The Qur’an, however, teaches that the Trinity divides God up and violates its own understanding of monotheism (called “Tauhid” in Islam). Modern Muslim apologists repeat the refrain that the Trinity is fundamentally inconsistent with the confession of monotheism. When it is pointed out to them that the doctrine of the Trinity, in all of its classical expressions, begins and ends with the affirmation of the unity (indivisibility) of God’s being and the absolute truth of monotheism, the response is to question the accuracy of the definitions, for the Qur’an says otherwise! This brings us back to the authority issue and to the fact that the Qur’an misrepresents the doctrine, a fact that is a valuable apologetic tool that demonstrates the true nature of the Qur’an’s status as a supposed revelation from God.

The Qur’anic text goes on to prescribe “painful punishment” for those who “persist in disbelief” (i.e., continue to believe in the Trinity). It likewise asserts boldly that Christ was “but an apostle,” or as another translation renders it, “only a Messenger.”⁶ This statement clearly denies Jesus’ divine nature. The Qur’an has the mistaken idea that Christians make Jesus and His mother Mary into two separate gods in addition to the true God. Note these words: “And when God will ask: ‘O Jesus, son of Mary, did you say to mankind: “Worship me and my mother as two deities apart from God?”’ (Jesus) will answer: ‘Halleluja. Could I say what I knew I had no right (to say)?…I said nought to them but what You commanded me: Worship God, my Lord and your Lord’” (Sura 5:116–17).

It is easy to understand how Muhammad became confused about this. While visiting Jerusalem around the beginning of the seventh century, Muhammad would have observed a strong devotion to Mary. Combining this with his ignorance of sound Christian teaching and biblical revelation while operating on an unchallenged assumption of Unitarianism (discussed below), Muhammad could only have seen Christians as promoting a form of polytheism, with Jesus and Mary as gods. Muhammad argued that Jesus and Mary were human because they ate food. He assumed that everyone understood that God does not, and cannot, eat food. Of course, the Christian who understands that Jesus is the God-man, fully God and fully man, knows this objection is baseless. The difficult task is communicating this truth to Muslims, who follow the errors their religion’s founder made many centuries ago.

Assumption of Unitarianism

The next important aspect of the discussion with a Muslim on the doctrine of the Trinity has to do with a common problem faced by the Christian apologist: category errors. Anyone who has dialogued with a Jehovah’s Witness knows the importance of keeping one’s categories straight. Many of the “strongest” attacks on the deity of Christ are based upon confusing the categories of divinity and humanity, especially when discussing Christ in His incarnate state, or when discussing the relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. This is even more important in dealing with Muslims since their category errors are derived from a part of their ultimate authority (the Qur’an).

The first issue that must be addressed is the ever-present assumption of Unitarianism on the part of Muslims. The vast majority of their arguments against the Trinity focus on a simple formula: “God is one. Therefore God cannot be three.” What does this statement assume? It assumes that because God’s being is one, it cannot be shared by more than one person. It asserts that when we affirm the unity of God’s being, we likewise must affirm the singularity of His person. Trinitarianism likewise asserts that God’s being is one but insists that this does not mean that three divine persons cannot fully share in one divine being.

Unitarianism commits a category error by insisting that the statement “God is one” applies to both “being” and “person.” The Muslim who repeats the words of Deuteronomy 6:4 — “The Lord our God is one” — assumes this means both one being and one person, when, in fact, it refers only to God’s being.

The Christian must explain the difference between “being” and “person” and then challenge this assumption repeatedly, for it will come up over and over again in the Muslim’s attempt to string together a biblical case against the Trinity or the deity of Christ. Being is what someone is; person is who someone is. As human beings, each of us is a distinct person. Each human is only one “what” and one “who.” God’s being, however, is not limited to time and space as is ours. Three divine and eternal persons — the Father, the Son, and the Spirit — can fully share God’s being. One what, three whos. You cannot assume the Muslim has ever heard these basic distinctions explained, and even then, you may have to repeat yourself and use different terms to get the message across. It can be a very frustrating experience, but if we love God’s truth, we will not become weary.

The importance of avoiding category errors can be illustrated by examining the common use of John 17:3 to deny the deity of Christ. It says, “This is eternal life: that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent” (nasb). The argument used by anti-Trinitarians goes like this: Jesus, as a man on earth, prayed to God in heaven. He differentiated Himself from the Father by referring to God in the second person, “You.” Most importantly, Jesus denied He was God by saying the Father is “the only true God.” Jesus, therefore, cannot be deity if He said the Father alone is God!

How does one respond to such an assertion? Surely Christians can point to the surrounding context, including the clear reference to the deity of Christ in John 17:5 (“the glory I had with you before the world began”) as arguing strongly against this faulty interpretation of John 17:3.

Fundamentally, however, the interpretation offered assumes its own conclusion, and this is what must be challenged and corrected. Notice the unstated foundation of the argument: If the Father is the only true God and if God is Unitarian in nature (can be only one person), then Jesus cannot be deity. If we remove the assumed Unitarianism, however, the weight of the argument disappears.

It is obviously true that the Father is the only true God, for there is only one true God, and no one argues that Jesus taught polytheism! As long as the assumption of Unitarianism is left out of the equation, however, the conclusion is left without a foundation. Yes, the Father is the only true God, but since the being of God is not limited to a single person, then Jesus can likewise be called the “only true God,” for He fully participates in that same divine being (see John 1:1, 17:5; Rom. 9:5; Titus 2:13). The only weight the argument has is its own implied Unitarianism. Sadly, this argument is often allowed to go unchallenged, no matter who is presenting it.

Islamic apologists establish their biblical arguments against the Trinity upon this assumed Unitarianism. They may not state it openly or even use the terminology itself, but the sharp apologist will identify the implied Unitarianism in the arguments placed before him or her. This will become clear when we examine some of the favorite passages used by Muslim apologists.

When challenged, Muslim apologists, like most anti-Trinitarians, have a difficult time defending Unitarianism. They are rarely challenged on it and hence have not had to explain why “God is one” must mean “God is one in being and in person.” Citation of such passages as the Shema (Deut. 6:4) may be provided, but very rarely will a substantive defense be mounted. The fact is, every passage that affirms monotheism (one God) is wholeheartedly embraced by every Christian Trinitarian. Going beyond “God is one” to “God is unipersonal,” however, is a completely different issue, requiring one to deal with the biblical evidence of three divine persons, and the Muslim apologist is generally not ready to tackle this.

To help the Muslim understand this doctrine, you might explain that Trinitarianism is not the opposite of monotheism (an assumption they may be carrying into every word you speak). You might say, “The opposite of monotheism is polytheism, and we both know that is wrong. Where you and I disagree is not about whether there is only one true God, but whether that God is limited to one divine person, or, as the Bible reveals, three divine persons. Our conflict is between your assumption of Unitarianism and my acceptance of the divinely revealed fact that three divine persons have eternally existed in relationship with each other.” At this point, a few questions might be asked to make sure the Muslim understands that you are not promoting polytheism and that the real issue is whether the Scriptures reveal the existence of more than one divine person.⁷

One other assumption that is common to Muslim apologists must be addressed. Just as the nature of the Trinity is unique, so too, the nature of Jesus Christ as the God-man is unique. Muslims hold to traditional beliefs that preclude the possibility of God entering into human flesh. Some are rather basic, but in general they all can be boiled down to the idea that Allah would never deem it fitting to enter into His own creation. They focus on the alleged difficulties that would exist if God were, in fact, to become incarnate (God in the flesh).

There are many speculative questions about Jesus’ life that the Word of God does not answer. We know almost nothing about what it was like to live with such a sinless person, or exactly how Jesus behaved as a child (outside of the fact that at age 12 He knew His Father and His Father’s business). Such questions know no end, but the Muslims can be answered by asking: “Does the Creator of all things lack the capacity to live within His own creation if He chooses to do so? Is God incapable of this?” Is the Muslim truly comfortable saying Allah has the power to create the universe but not the power to enter into it? Ask him or her to support the belief that God does not have this power. When the question of why is raised, move directly to the glorious condescension of the love of Christ that brought Him into human flesh (John 1:14–18; Phil. 2:5–11).

Arguments from Eisegesis

Eisegesis is the opposite of exegesis. Eisegesis is reading into a text a meaning its original author never intended. Exegesis, on the other hand, allows the text to speak for itself, or in other words, it seeks to draw the originally intended meaning solely from the text. Sound exegesis takes into consideration everything that shapes communication in written form: historical background, literary context, and language (grammar, lexical meanings of words, etc.). Doing the work of exegesis shows respect for the original text. Engaging in eisegesis shows no respect for the text or its author. None of us likes to be misinterpreted or to have improper assertions, motivations, or conclusions attributed to us by careless reading of what we have written. We show respect for God’s Word, therefore, by handling it with care and seeking to hear what it says without inserting our own thoughts, traditions, desires, or beliefs in the place of God’s truth.

It should be remembered that the majority of Muslims who present “biblical” arguments against the Trinity probably believe the Bible to be inconsistent and self-contradictory.⁸ As a result, they will not feel the need to interpret a passage in light of other passages that may be clearer or more to the point. In fact, the primary force in their interpretation will not be other passages of the Bible at all, but the overriding teaching of the Qur’an. When this is the case, using phrases such as, “Let’s interpret this passage consistently with the author’s own views expressed elsewhere,” or, “Let’s show respect to the text by not ignoring the context of this passage” can be helpful in communicating the concept.

Popular Islamic apologetics is virtually devoid of sound exegetical content. In comparison with other anti-Trinitarian groups, the material found in the standard Web sites promoting Islam in the United States and other Western countries is simply abysmal. The vast majority of biblical information presented to Muslims by their apologetics community is horrifically flawed on almost every possible level. Wild claims about alleged contradictions and corruptions are mixed in with “standard” types of arguments against biblical inerrancy, seemingly without any recognition or understanding of the problems with the argument and claims being presented. The fact that the argumentation is bad, however, does not make it much easier to rebut. A very flawed argument can be held just as firmly as a slightly flawed one can be held.

One highly effective way to reduce the number of Bible passages you will have to deal with specifically is to clear up one of the major misconceptions right at the start. The largest portion of the arsenal the Muslim likely will use is made up from those verses that differentiate between the Father and the Son. Passages such as Colossians 1:1, which contain the phrase: “an apostle of Jesus Christ by the will of God,” will be thrust forward with the conclusion: “See, Jesus is not God!” (based upon Unitarian assumptions). These can all be handled at one time by stating at the beginning, “Proving that the Father is not the Son is not going to assist you in showing the Bible does not teach the Trinity, for that is exactly what the doctrine of the Trinity states. The Father is not the Son, and since the normal term for the Father in the New Testament is ‘God’ and the normal term for the Son is ‘Lord,’ all the passages you might present differentiating them from one another will only cause me to nod my head in agreement.” Of course, merely explaining it will not stop the recitation of the verses, but after one or two examples are offered and responded to in the same fashion, the point will be driven home.

One argument that figured prominently in the debate mentioned earlier involves the differentiation between God and man that is basic to both Christianity and Islam. The argument was based upon Jesus’ words recorded in John 8:40: “But as it is, you are seeking to kill Me, a man who has told you the truth, which I heard from God; this Abraham did not do” (nasb). The argument is as follows: Jesus called Himself “a man who has told you the truth.” We all know God is not a man, and since Jesus is a man, He cannot possibly be God.⁹ This one consideration alone makes it plain that the Trinity is in error.

Such an argument, however, clearly is circular. It assumes what it seeks to prove. It is based upon the assumption that Jesus could not be both God and man; therefore, the Christian belief in Jesus as the God-man is precluded, not by the teaching of this passage, but by definition. Jesus surely was a man who told the truth, but according to John He was also the eternal divine Word who became flesh (John 1:1, 14), who claimed to be the great I Am who was before Abraham (John 8:24, 18:5–6), and who was proclaimed by His closest disciples to be our Lord and God (John 20:28). John did not intend us to isolate one term to the exclusion of the rest of his testimony.

There are, of course, other classic biblical passages that one must deal with when responding to any argument that seeks to make Christ either a lesser deity or merely a creature. These passages also are often interpreted without concern for context. John 14:28 (“The Father is greater than I”), John 20:17 (“My God and your God”), and 1 Corinthians 11:3 (“God is the head of Christ”) are cited often, and the sharp apologist needs to be ready to give a fair, biblically based explanation of the relationship between the Father and the Son during the Incarnation¹⁰ as well as the roles taken by Father, Son, and Spirit in redemption.¹¹ Muslims may not have the same “bent” on their use of these passages as do other groups who also deny the Trinity, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses or the Way International, but asking basic questions about what they think the passage means can help expose their underlying assumptions and keep the conversation going in the right direction.

EXALTING THE WORD

When I rose to give my closing statements to the mixed Muslim and Christian audience, I asked the Lord to guide me in speaking His truth so as to communicate to the unbelievers there the truths He would have them to hear. I strongly emphasized the biblical teaching that Jesus Christ is our Creator (Col. 1:15–17) and that every breath we breathe, every beat of our heart, is a gift from His hand. If what the Bible says about Jesus Christ is true, then we need not only to obey that revelation but also to deal with Christ’s claims on our lives. Dismissing Him as a mere prophet would be to show Him great disrespect, and to die without knowing our Creator would be to die in our sins. I let the Word of God testify to the grandeur and majesty of Christ, and I did all I could to communicate as clearly as possible the glory of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ (Titus 2:13; 2 Pet. 1:1).

That is all any of us can do: speak the truth in love, and trust God to glorify Himself with the results. I pray this study has edified you in your knowledge of God’s triune nature and emboldened you to stand for that truth even in the face of Islamic apologetics.

NOTES

1. See my article “Loving the Trinity,” Christian Research Journal 21, 4 (1999): 21–25, 40–41.

2. For those who wish to engage Muslims on their own ground, a strong case can be made from the Qur’an against the idea of the corruption of the text of the Bible, despite the popularity of this belief among Muslims today. A number of articles at www.answering-islam.org address this issue. Sura 6:34 reflects a common theme in the Qur’an: “There is no changing the word of God: the news of (past) apostles has come to you already.” See also Sura 5:65–66. The fact that most American Islamic apologists choose to assume corruption of the text of the Bible is noteworthy.

3. Ahmed Ali, Al-Qur’ân: A Contemporary Translation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). Unless otherwise noted, this is the version of the Qur’an used throughout this study.

4. Modalism denies the eternal existence of three divine persons. It reduces the three divine persons to three manifestations of a single person, or to three “modes” of being.

5. Muslim apologists cannot excuse this evidence by making reference to early Trinitarian controversies. When the Qur’an was written, the issue had been settled, and the Christians with whom Muhammad had contact would well have known the truth of the doctrine.

6. Amatul Rahman Omar and Abdul Mannan Omar, The Holy Qur’ân: Arabic Text-English Translation (Hockessin, DE: Noor Foundation International, 2000).

7. Two days after the debate noted in this article (against Hamza Abdul Malik), I debated a leading Oneness proponent (Robert Sabin) on the doctrine of the Trinity. It is ironic that while my Muslim opponent vociferously denied the deity of Christ and my Oneness opponent strongly affirmed it, they both used the same Unitarian arguments. In the second debate I presented three primary evidences for the eternal existence of the Son as a divine person in distinction from the Father: John 1:1, John 17:5, and Philippians 2:5–11. See these debates at www.aomin.org.

8. In fact, it is my experience that some Muslim apologists will use the Trinitarian discussion as a means of transitioning into their real goal, which is the demonstration of the alleged corruption of the text of the Bible.

9. My Muslim debate opponent handled those passages that identify Jesus as God by dismissing every single one of them as a later addition to the text of Scripture. When challenged to provide historical documentation in support of this allegation of massive textual corruption, he failed to do so. I pointed out that given his standards, we might as well conclude that the passages he was citing were all inserted as well! Most Muslim apologists will at least try to argue the common Unitarian interpretation of these passages rather than simply dismiss them as a wholesale example of corruption.

10. The Father was positionally greater than the Son when the Son voluntarily humbled Himself — hence the words of John 14:28; Jesus, being the God-man, as a perfect man, acknowledged the Father as His God.

11. These issues are addressed more fully in my book, The Forgotten Trinity (Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1998).

SYNOPSIS

As Christians encounter Islamic apologetics the topic quickly turns to ultimate sources of authority. Muslims are taught that the Bible is untrustworthy, and many believe that its text has been altered. In reality it is the Qur’an that suffers in comparison with the Bible on the issue of textual study and purity. Christians believe that the more the Bible’s history is studied, the more certain its text becomes. Christians encourage textual study and discovery of new manuscripts, while Muslims show little interest in researching the history of their own scriptures, preferring the traditional belief that the Qur’an is perfect in its current state. Often believers are stymied by attacks on the text of the Bible because of their misunderstanding of the history of the transmission of the text of Scripture. Christians need to be able to defend the integrity of the biblical text and to use the sharp contrast between the scriptures of the two faiths as a means of presenting the truth about Jesus Christ.

In May of 1999, a group of Christians and Muslims gathered at the Bible Baptist Church of Syosset, New York, to hear debate on the question, Does the New Testament teach the deity of Christ?¹ The Muslim position was represented by Hamza Abdul Malik of the Islamic Propagation Center. I represented the Christian position. It immediately became quite clear that Malik’s thesis was not that the New Testament, as it exists today, denies the deity of Christ, but that all passages that can be presented to support this doctrine were later interpolations; that is, corruptions of the “original” New Testament writings. When challenged to provide any documentation for this assertion in the form of New Testament manuscripts, however, Malik informed the audience that he could not name any, “but they are there.”

This encounter clearly illustrates the foundational nature of the Christian belief in the inspiration and divine preservation of the Bible to all forms of apologetic and evangelistic effort. The character of Christ is central to a proper presentation of the Gospel. Muslims, however, reject the revealed truths about Christ and question the accuracy of the biblical texts upon which those truths are based. They seek to contrast the “many errors of the Bible” with the “perfect Qur’an.” In this article, the Muslim’s assertion that the Bible has been corrupted over time, and that it is self-contradictory, will be contrasted with their claim that the Qur’an is not only perfect in its inspiration but in its preservation as well.

It is no longer possible for any Christian to ignore the claims of Islam. It is no longer prudent to remain ignorant of the Qur’an and the tenets of the Islamic faith. Given the continuous attacks against the Christian Scriptures launched from every side, it is also no longer possible for Christians to be effective in the proclamation of their faith without having a firm and accurate knowledge of the means God used to bring us His Word, as well as an understanding of why it can be trusted.

THE BIBLE AND THE QUR’AN CONTRASTED

The Bible and the Qur’an are both called “holy books,” but the two works are strikingly different. The Qur’an contains many stories obviously drawn from biblical sources, but the differences between the two texts greatly outweigh the similarities.

The Bible

The Bible contains many different forms of writing, including historical, didactic, prophetic, poetic, apocalyptic, and parabolic forms. A large number of authors wrote the Bible over a period of approximately 1,500 years.² They wrote in different languages and in different parts of the world, and they lived in strikingly different times in world history. Christians, nevertheless, confess that their writing is “God-breathed” — indeed, the very Word of God (Matt. 22:31; 2 Tim. 3:16–17; 2 Pet. 1:20–21).

Christians have always desired to see their Scriptures spread far and wide and in as many languages as possible,³ believing the message of the Gospel remains the Word of God even when translated into languages that did not exist when the Bible was written. Christians also believe the original manuscripts of the Bible were inspired, but they do not claim inspiration for subsequent copies. They see God’s providential protection of the biblical text in the wealth and consistency of the manuscripts produced over the early centuries of the faith rather than in any single manuscript or “inspired version.”⁴

This confidence in God’s protection of the text over time has led to a willingness among Christian scholars to engage in detailed examination of the earliest manuscripts of the Bible, both Old Testament and New Testament. Christian scholarship thus looks forward to more findings of ancient biblical manuscripts while remaining increasingly confident in the accuracy of the Bible text.

The Qur’an

The Qur’an, on the other hand, is said to have come into existence over a very short period of time (less than three decades). Muslims believe Muhammad recited the words given to him by divine revelation and that those who heard him memorized those words. Early on, some of those words were written down as well. His words were not his own, but they were given by God. Even the organization of the Qur’an is said to come from God. The book is organized by “surahs” (chapters) placed in descending order, longest to shortest.

The Qur’an is written in Arabic. For a time, in the early history of Islam, there was a movement to allow for a broader interpretation and understanding of the text, but Muslim orthodoxy eventually adopted the idea of the “inimitability” of the book. It is perfect only as it is written in Arabic, and translation of the text into other languages is considered commentary at best, and unwise or unholy at worst. As a result, Muslims throughout the world memorize the Qur’an in a language the majority of them do not understand. Those who read Arabic confess that the book is not easily understood, and great confusion exists over the reading of major portions of the Qur’an.

Belief in the perfection of the Qur’an precludes, by definition, interest in the study of its earliest manuscripts, as it is considered impious to entertain even the possibility that its early manuscripts differ in the slightest from the modern version. For Muslim orthodoxy, the Qur’an as it exists in Arabic today is exactly as it came into existence in the decades after Muhammad’s death. This is when Uthman, the third Caliph (a.d. 644–656), produced the “official” version of the Qur’an.⁵

ATTITUDES TOWARD MANUSCRIPT FINDS

The indisputable difference between the attitudes of Christian scholars and Islamic scholars is best illustrated by the Sana’a Qur’an find of 1972. Workers, restoring a mosque in Sana’a, Yemen, stumbled across a cache of Qur’an manuscripts in the structure of the building’s roof. The manuscripts were stuffed into sacks and probably would have stayed there had the value of the find not been recognized by an official of the Yemeni Antiquities Authority. No scholars in his country were capable of working on this rich find, and so the Yemeni official called in non-Islamic German scholars to assist. Almost 10 years after the initial discovery, German scholar Gerd-R. Puin was allowed to spend significant time with the manuscripts. Only one other scholar has been given any significant amount of time to study the manuscripts. It was not until 1997 that 35,000 microfilm images of the manuscripts were finally allowed to leave the country so others could examine the materials.

The Sana’a find has tremendous importance for Qur’anic studies, at least for those who wish to see the Qur’an studied in all its actual historical forms. Initial studies of the find indicate that it contains some of the earliest known Qur’anic material. This find also gives evidence of variation from today’s Qur’an in both the reading of the text and its order, something unthinkable in traditional Islamic doctrine.

When parallel finds that have bearing on the Bible have come to light, Christian scholars have almost climbed over each other to gain access to the manuscripts. Such finds generate great excitement. No such excitement, however, exists in Islam. The contrast is striking. Christians wish to see more and more light shed on the earliest manuscripts of their scriptures, while Muslims resist, often with great fervor, all such inquiry into the history of the Qur’an.

In 1995, an Egyptian court labeled Abu Zaid an apostate, and his wife was ordered, under Islamic law, to divorce him. He and his wife fled to Holland. His crime? Zaid dared to put into writing a conclusion that a number of other Muslim scholars know to be true (but fear to express openly). He said the Qur’an was a literary document that needed to be examined as such. The study of the Qur’an outside the parameters of strict Muslim orthodoxy can be very, very dangerous. One only need mention the name Rushdie to conjure up the possible result of making an “offensive” statement concerning the Prophet or the Qur’an. It is no wonder, then, that many ancient texts bearing directly on the original form of the Qur’an currently sit unexamined in Muslim lands. Fear of being accused of apostasy for daring to question the orthodox view of the Qur’an is the primary reason these texts remain hidden.

MUSLIM TEXTUAL CLAIMS

Islamic apologists, meanwhile, happily refer to the existence of textual variants in the manuscripts of the Bible. A quick Internet search will turn up dozens of pages containing wild claims concerning the level of “corruption” in the Bible. A vast majority of their authors lack any substantive understanding of the issues involved; instead, they seek to utilize sensationalism to communicate to the average Muslim a horribly false picture of the facts concerning the transmission of the text of the Bible. Quotations from scholarly Christian sources are presented without context and with extremely exaggerated commentary appended, presenting conclusions far beyond anything the cited scholars would ever endorse. No care is taken to differentiate between consistent, historical sources and inconsistent, ahistorical, theoretical sources. Islamic apologetic literature as a whole falls far short of even the level of attempted integrity found in the writings of the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society or other such cultic groups.⁶ Its sheer bulk, however, often gives the impression to its intended audience that it “must be true.”

One such Islamic effort responds to the same criticism I am leveling in this article: the Islamic avoidance of meaningful inquiry into the ancient form of the Qur’an. While asserting that Islam has a long history of Qur’anic study, the Muslim writer makes a glaring admission. He cites from a Christian article that states, “In particular, let us ask why some of the oldest manuscripts are not photographically reproduced and made available to the public and the scholars. Why not start with the Topkapi manuscript in Istambul, the Taschkent manuscript, and the two old manuscripts in Cairo and Damascus? They are not Uthmanic manuscripts as some believe, but they are quite old.”⁷ The Muslim’s response inadvertently substantiates the thesis of the Christian article when he remarks, “Firstly, when we have a Qur’anic text right from the time of the Prophetand know the variant readings associated with it beforehand, why do they need the superfluous work of going through the manuscripts to check out variant readings?”

The writer goes on to list numerous “rules” for examining the Qur’an, all of which, of course, developed long after the production of the Qur’an and are designed to establish the current text as the one to be read and followed. The point, however, has already been established: It is a matter of faith that “we have a Qur’anic text right from the time of the Prophet,” so why sweat the details of ancient manuscripts and their vitally important variations? The overriding assertion of the perfection of the Qur’an simply precludes the meaningful construction of an apologetic defense of its own perfection! This attitude is identical to the King James Only advocate who, when faced with the multitude of papyri manuscripts and major uncial texts from antiquity responds, “We have the perfect Bible in the King James, so examining such ancient texts would simply be superfluous.” The circularity of the argument is clear.

THE VAST DIFFERENCE IN VERIFIABILITY

The fact that Christian scholars welcome the discovery of new manuscript finds and rejoice to study the textual origins of the Bible, while Muslims quietly hope that finds of ancient Qur’anic texts are not noticed provides Christians with a vitally important apologetic tool. What is useful in the witnessing encounter with the Muslim is not merely that we can have full confidence in the results of such factual and fair study;⁸ it is, rather, the truth it points to that must be understood and communicated. The Muslim claim of a “perfect Qur’an” is a statement of faith that cannot be vindicated by factual evidence, but the Christian claim that God has preserved His Word can be substantiated. Not only must this truth be understood, but the Christian, who seeks to proclaim the life-giving Gospel to Muslims, must also be able to express it with clarity and force. To do so, we must first understand it ourselves. Since the subject of the transmission of the text of the Bible over time is not normally a part of our Sunday School curriculum (though it should be!), a summary of this vitally important subject is presented here.

The Preservation and Protection of the Biblical Text

The greatest stumbling block facing the Christian apologist who seeks to contrast the historically verifiable pedigree of the Bible with the faith-based, but unverifiable, claims of perfection for the Qur’an is the existence of textual variants in the manuscripts of the Old and New Testaments. Since scholars refer to any variation as a “corruption,” Muslim apologists make reference to this as evidence that the Bible is untrustworthy. The Qur’an, though more than half a millennium younger than the New Testament, likewise displays textual variation in its most ancient manuscripts. As we have seen, however, Islamic theology does not encourage the examination of these variations because the current text of the Qur’an is considered inviolable.

Any written document transmitted over time is going to exhibit textual variation. This does not mean that the original readings are no longer present or preserved within the manuscript tradition⁹ itself. Pointing to the existence of textual variation means nothing unless the critic can then prove that the variation results in a loss of the original readings. This is something Muslim apologists do not even attempt to do. They simply rely on the normal, nonscholarly meaning of the term “corruption” to communicate an idea not present in the specific use of the term by textual scholars.

Consider the real situation when it comes to the manuscripts of the Bible. God preserved the Old and New Testaments in different ways, corresponding to the different ways in which they were produced. The Old Testament has one kind of mechanism for preservation consistent with the great length of time over which it was written, and the New Testament another, corresponding to the much briefer period of its writing. Since the controversies between Christianity and Islam focus primarily on doctrines plainly taught in the New Testament, most of the focus of Islamic apologists has been on the New Testament documents rather than those of the Old. The New Testament documents, however, are by far the most easily defended against the charge of purposeful corruption, due to both the younger age of the New Testament as well as the large number of manuscripts available.

We have more than 5,300 manuscripts of the New Testament in the original Greek language. Most of these manuscripts are from a later point in history (after the tenth century), but the witness from the earliest centuries is rich indeed. Beyond the Greek manuscript tradition, which is the primary witness to the original text of the New Testament, we have translations of the Greek into other languages, such as Latin and Syriac. Of utmost importance, these manuscripts come from all over the known world of the day, not from any central location. This is quite important as we shall now see.

The Muslim Claim of Corruption

It is the body of these manuscripts, especially as seen in the earliest texts, that provides the strongest bulwark of confidence for the Christian and the substance of the Christian answer to Islamic attacks on the Scriptures. Muslims assert that changes purposefully have been made in the New Testament text, either inserting doctrines unknown to Jesus and the apostles (this was Malik’s claim in our debate) or deleting doctrines opposed to the evolving Christian orthodoxy (such as “hiding” references to Muhammad in John 14 and 16). The problem for the Muslim is to explain how such insertions or deletions could be made in light of the means by which the New Testament documents were spread across the Roman Empire.

Consider, for example, the prologue of the Gospel of John. This passage (John 1:1–18) contains tremendous theological truths, including references to the deity of Christ, the eternal nature of God, the relationship of the Father and the Son, the Gospel, grace, faith, creation, and more. Let’s say some religious leader in Syria at the end of the fourth century wished to “alter” this passage of Scripture by deleting the reference to the eternal relationship of the Father and the Son in the first verse. How would such a change be made? The leader might be able to write a “new” introduction to John and send out copies of his new version, but what about all the manuscripts of John that already exist throughout the Roman Empire? He may not worry himself about them, thinking it is only relevant to have altered copies in his own region; but what will happen in such a situation? Will the altered texts replace the original?

Certainly not! Looking at this situation from our perspective today, it is obvious what would happen. We have manuscripts of the Gospel of John that predate the end of the fourth century. A comparison of these earlier texts with the altered texts would clearly indicate the later alteration. The unaltered texts in the rest of the world, furthermore, would continue to be copied, so the obvious alteration in the one location would be easily detected.

The Tenacity of the Text

The New Testament manuscript tradition exhibits what is called “tenacity,” that is, once a reading enters the tradition, it remains there. Scribes were extremely conservative in their handling of the text and were fearful of “losing” anything in the copy or copies they were working from. Even when a scribe might make a mistake that is obvious, the following scribes would be hesitant to change or “correct” what was found before them in the texts they were copying. This tenacity is a vitally important truth, for while it does mean we have to engage in the study of textual variants, it also means something much more important: the original readings of the original documents remain in the manuscript tradition. We are not out on some wild goose chase when we examine variations between manuscripts. The original reading is there. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. The Christian exegete, pastor, scholar, and apologist can respond to the critic, Muslim, or other unbeliever, and say with confidence, “We possess today what the apostles wrote long ago.” We can openly embrace the small percentage of textual variations in the text¹⁰ that require us to engage in the work of discovering the original reading. The cost, however, is a small one, for we can also refute, firmly and finally, the claim that the text has been altered in order to remove, or insert, doctrinal content.

We must communicate to the Muslim who doubts the veracity of Scripture the truth that there has never been a time in the history of the world when any one person, one group, or one church had the ability to go throughout the world and collect all the manuscripts of the Bible and make the kind of purposeful alterations Muslim apologists claim were made in the text of the Bible. The wholesale insertion of entire doctrines into literally hundreds of passages across the entire scope of the Bible is simply impossible on any historical basis, and this would be required if, for example, the deity of Christ had been interpolated into a text that originally did not teach it. The manuscript tradition would contain clear and unmistakable evidence of these changes, and yet it does not.

Muhammad in John 14

Consider the common assertion of Muslim apologists that the words of Jesus regarding the Holy Spirit in John 14 and 16 have been altered so that a prophecy of Muhammad could be expunged from the Bible. Lengthy articles have been written to substantiate this allegation.¹¹ The argument is that the “paraclete,” the Holy Spirit, is an alteration, and that the original word was “periklytos,” the “highly exalted one,” that is, Muhammad.

Just a few moments of reflection on the facts, however, will provide an overwhelming response. First, Muhammad died in the middle of the seventh century. We have fragments of manuscripts of the Gospel of John that date to the second century, with complete manuscripts that predate Muhammad by over 400 years! Why would anyone alter the text of John to hide a prophecy about Muhammad centuries before Muhammad came on the scene? Second, no variant readings indicate any alteration of the text whatsoever in manuscripts before or after the time of Muhammad. Not a shred of documentable evidence is in the manuscript tradition to support such an assertion. Third, the simple reading of the text defies the amazingly facile interpretations offered by Muslim apologists who seek to turn the discussion of the Holy Spirit into a prophecy of Muhammad. Despite these facts, however, Islamic propagandists continue to claim the Gospel of John “originally” contained a prophecy about the coming of Muhammad.

COMMUNICATION WITH THE DECEIVED

Muslims who live in non-Muslim countries where some form of Christianity predominates are forced, by their minority status, to consider at least some elements of the religious claims of the Christian faith. The information they have been given on the topic of the Bible’s reliability has probably not come from believing and informed Christians, but from their own community, which has no reason to seriously look at the facts about the transmission of the biblical text.

That means the Christian who seeks to proclaim the Gospel of grace to the Muslim is faced with certain obstacles that must be cleared. When the claim of the perfection of the Qur’an is raised, the fact that this is a statement of faith without foundation must be addressed. When the assertion is made that the text of the Bible has been corrupted and changed, the Christian who is familiar with the issues will be able to stand firmly upon the truth and continue to press forward the claims of Christ. The Christian may not only acknowledge the existence of textual variations in the manuscript traditions of the Bible, but he or she can turn the issue around and demonstrate that through these very variations God has preserved and protected the Scriptures from such wholesale changes over time as the Muslim apologists allege. Such an approach may well earn an open-minded hearing from the Muslim.

NOTES

1. This debate is available in audio, video, and mp3 formats at http://www.aomin.org.

2. I reject as unfounded and unverifiable redaction-based theories concerning the origination of both Old and New Testament texts. German “higher-critical” thinking has led only to a denigration of the actual study of the texts of the Bible. It is derived from an antisupernatural worldview, which is directly at odds with a Christian worldview. I find far more reason to believe Moses wrote the Pentateuch than to believe the Graf-Wellhausen theory, which is nothing more than wishful thinking on the part of materialistic naturalists. The everchanging canons of redaction criticism can be used to “demonstrate” any theory an enterprising scholar wishes to see published.

3. The suppression of such a desire through the enshrinement of the Latin Vulgate and the prohibition of “unguided” reading of the Bible in medieval Catholicism derived from the same unbiblical and non-Christian sources as the contemporary doctrine of purgatory, the Inquisition, and the Crusades.

4. Exceptions to this are found in such widely divergent movements as Pope Sixtus V’s “infallible Vulgate” and the modern-day King James Only movement, both of which appeal to a standardized text rather than to the entirety of the manuscript tradition. In response to the King James Only movement, see my article, “Is Your Modern Translation Corrupt? Answering the Allegations of KJV Only Advocates,” Christian Research Journal 18, 3 (1996): 20–27.

5. The fact that Uthman had to undertake such a revision should indicate to the open-minded investigator that a need existed for the work, which immediately causes one to wonder why one should accept the final decision of Uthman. Such a revision, moreover, closes the door (outside of the examination of non-Uthmanian ancient versions of the Qur’an) to any meaningful claim to be able to trace the text beyond that point, all the way to Muhammad himself.

6. Christian apologists at http://www.answering-islam.org have provided dozens of examples of this kind of factual error in the writings of Islamic apologists.

7. http://www.answering-islam.org.uk/Quran/Text/ criticaltext.html.

8. I speak of factual and fair study in order to exclude the nonfactual and unfair study that marks such enterprises as the Jesus Seminar.

9. The phrase “manuscript tradition” refers to the entire body of manuscripts of all languages of the same historical document; in this case, the New Testament.

10. Many critics, from Islamic apologists even to Roman Catholic writers (see Robert Sungenis, Not by Scripture Alone [Santa Barbara, CA: Queenship, 1997], 254–55), will inflate the amount of textual variation so as to cast doubt upon the text of the Bible. They will list verses, instead of words, in order to inflate percentages. Not every textual variation, moreover, is even relevant; for example, many variants involve transposition of words, which rarely impacts translational meaning. Others include the spelling of a place name or the use of a synonym. Including these variants along with the truly important ones can mislead the person who is ignorant of the true textual purity of the New Testament.

11. These attempts are commonly found in Muslim apologetic writings and on their Web sites. They misuse every form of linguistic study, from acontextual miscitations of scholarly Christian sources to the most inane grammatical arguments. To see the lengths to which some go on this issue, see http://www.answering-christianity.org/prediction.htm.