Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam

by Robert Spencer

  ROBERT SPENCER

  Not Peace but a Sword

  The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam

  Catholic

  Answers

  Press

  San Diego

  2013

  Not Peace but a Sword

  The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam

  © 2013 by Robert Spencer

  All rights reserved. Except for quotations, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, uploading to the Internet, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.

  Unless otherwise noted, biblical citations are taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (© 1971 by Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America).

  Published by Catholic Answers, Inc.

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  All italics added for emphasis in citations from Scripture and ancient texts are the author’s.

  In memory of the Christian martyrs of Islamic jihad, known and unknown.

  Your martyrs, O Lord, received the crown of immortality from you, O our God, on account of their struggle. Armed with your strength, they have vanquished their persecutors and crushed the powerless arrogance of demons. Through their intercessions, O Christ God, save our souls.

  This book would not have been written were it not for Todd M. Aglialoro, who conceived of it, encouraged me to write it, smoothed out its infelicities, and ably saw it through to completion. I am grateful for his patience and his keen eye. Thanks also to Fr. Thomas P. Steinmetz, a priest of priests, and to the many Catholic and Orthodox believers from the Middle East who discussed the issues in this book with me. Though I cannot name them for unfortunate but unavoidable reasons, I am deeply grateful for their insights.

  Introduction

  Vile Heretics, Separated Brethren, or Something Else?

  Can’t we all just get along? Maybe not. And if not, what then?

  A book about the differences, rather than similarities, of two religious traditions, and how in certain important ways we may not be able to get along, and indeed should not work closely together (even as we strive always to preserve harmonious relations), may seem at first glance to be uncharitable. It is certainly against the spirit of the age.

  To those who assume that to speak of other religions in anything but a complimentary fashion is contrary to Vatican II and to the divine command to love our neighbor, it may even seem un-Christian.

  It is a peculiar, albeit common, misconception of our age to think that dispensing with the truth can be an act of charity. It never truly can be. We must always, as the Apostle says, speak the truth in love—that is, enunciate the realities that we know to be true without rancor, or pride, or arrogance, or condemnation. But, we must never think our obligation to be charitable can or should overwhelm our responsibility to bear witness to the truth.

  When it comes to people of other faiths, as Catholics we must always treat them with the respect they warrant as human beings made in the image of God and endowed with an immortal soul, a soul for whom Christ died. It is not, however, an act either of disrespect or lack of charity to speak honestly about what divides us, about why we have separate religious traditions in the first place, and what the prospects are, in light of these differences, for collaboration and genuine dialogue.

  In fact, one of the oddities of contemporary “interfaith dialogue” is that all too often, out of overzealous irenicism, it glosses over, or ignores altogether, the disagreements between religious traditions, as if pretending that they didn’t exist would make them go away. This approach may make for a pleasant afternoon coffee, but as a basis for lasting cooperation or partnership it is fraught with hazards. The most obvious of these is the possibility that the very differences of belief and outlook that have been downplayed will operate in some way to derail the collaborative effort: People act all the time on the basis of the core assumptions and beliefs they have about the world and other people, and there is no field in which core assumptions and beliefs are more likely to come into play than the religious realm.

  A respectful and accurate examination of differences, then, can make cooperation between people of different faiths more fruitful, helping all parties see the parameters for dialogue clearly and guard against unrealistic expectations. This is particularly true regarding the vexing question of dialogue and cooperation with Muslims.

  It is fashionable in certain sectors for Catholics in the U.S. and Europe to call upon the Church to make common cause on life issues, and other areas of apparently shared moral concern, with Muslims. After all, both Catholics and Muslims face the same radical secularist foe; it’s time, or so the contention goes, for a common front of believers to defend the theistic worldview against ever more intrusive, arrogant, and assertive unbelievers. At the same time, however, this call for a common cause seems to meet an immediate obstacle in the growing Muslim aggression against Christians around the globe. For many, this raises some fundamental questions: Is cooperation with Muslims really a good idea? If so, to what extent can it be done? What are the implications of that cooperation?

  Related to these questions are considerations of what might be accomplished through dialogue between Catholics and Muslims, and indeed whether, given the realities of Islam’s theological view of Christians as well as present-day political realities, such dialogue (that is, a genuine, honest, mutually respectful give-and-take) is even possible.

  To answer these questions properly, Catholics should have a clear understanding of what they’re getting into when they enter into dialogue or make common cause with Muslims: They should know what Muslims actually believe about various issues of morality and ethics, and what they think of Catholics and of Christianity in general. Only then can they avoid pitfalls in a field that is unusually strewn with them.

  ***

  Islam today presents a double aspect. On the one hand, Islamic jihadists, acting explicitly and proudly in the name of Islam and its texts and teachings, commit acts of violence and persecute Christians with increasing virulence in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Nigeria, Indonesia, and elsewhere. (In such contexts it may be useful to recall that the Crusades, for all their errors and excesses, were a defensive action after 450 years of unanswered Islamic aggression.)

  On the other hand, Muslims in Western countries reach out to Catholics and other non-Muslims, pointing out all the many things that we have in common. These Muslims appear to be as different from their co-religionists who are torching churches and massacring Christians as a tongues-speaking, fire-baptized Pentecostal is from a blue-blooded Episcopalian who listens to NPR in his Mercedes.

  The relationship between these two groups of Muslims, and the relationship of Islam in general to Christianity and the Catholic Church, is the preoccupation of this book. We will explore how Muslims understand not only their own religion but also ours, and what that implies for the prospects of collaboration, dialogue, and more. We’ll also compare the Muslim and Catholic understandings of God, Christ, revelation, salvation, and morality.

  The object of these explorations is to generate more light than heat, but these are heated issues. It is our responsibility as Catholics to approach Muslims, as everyone else, with unflagging charity.<
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  That does not, however, require that we close our eyes.

  1

  Time for an “Ecumenical Jihad”?

  They’re pious. They’re pro-life. They’re uncompromising. What’s not to like?

  Many faithful Catholics today look at Muslims and see a formidable friend and ally in the struggle against secularist efforts to drive religion out of the public square and erase all vestiges of natural law from positive law. The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, tells Muslims that “thou wilt surely find the nearest of them in love to the believers are those who say ‘We are Christians’; that, because some of them are priests and monks, and they wax not proud” (5:82).1 And some Christians have been anxious to show that same love to the believers in Islam. The foremost popular exponent of this view is the Catholic philosopher and apologist Peter Kreeft, who engagingly articulated the need for this alliance in his 1996 book Ecumenical Jihad and reiterated and expanded upon his call for it in his 2010 follow-up, Between Allah and Jesus.

  “The age of religious wars is ending,” proclaimed Kreeft five years before the September 11 attacks. Kreeft continued: “The age of religious war is beginning: a war of all religions against none.”2 Kreeft issues a strong call for making common cause with Muslims on moral issues and questions relating to maintaining a place for religion in public life. Noting that the highly charged Arabic word jihad actually means simply “struggle,” he maintains that “an ‘ecumenical jihad’ is possible and is called for, for the simple and strong reason that Muslims and Christians preach and practice the same First Commandment: islam, total surrender, submission of the human will to the divine will. We fight side by side not only because we face a common enemy but above all because we serve and worship the same divine Commander.”3

  Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether Catholics and Muslims view the submission of the human will to the divine will in an identical or even analogous way, bolstering Kreeft’s point is the fact that Catholics and Muslims have already fought side by side. At the United Nations World Conference on Population and Development, held in Cairo in 1994, the international media made a great deal out of a Vatican alliance with Muslim nations in opposition to anti-life initiatives. At the World Conference on Women held the next year in Beijing, Catholics and Muslims together called upon the conference to emphasize the family’s role as society’s basic unit.

  These alliances were not flawless. At the Cairo conference, the Church along with Muslim leaders succeeded in ensuring that the final document affirmed that “in no case should abortion be promoted as a method of family planning,”4 but the Vatican failed to strike from the document all language suggesting that abortion was a woman’s right, leading the New York Times to report with obvious satisfaction that “many conference delegates said the Vatican seriously miscalculated its potential clout in the debate, especially among . . . Islamic governments to which it had appealed for support.”5 The Muslim representatives agreed to the language ruling out the use of abortion as a means of family planning but opposed Vatican efforts to call for an end to it in all circumstances. For Islamic law, unlike Church teaching and contrary to widespread belief, does not forbid abortion in every case.6

  Of course, Vatican officials don’t have to secure 100 percent agreement with everyone with whom they collaborate. The limitations of such cooperation with Muslims, however, are not isolated to disagreements about various aspects of core issues. They also stem from the irreconcilability between the calls for Christian-Muslim cooperation and the trend of anti-Christian violence committed by Muslims.

  The jihad against modern-day Christians

  In the popular mind, even after all these centuries since the Crusades, most Westerners tend to think that if there has been any aggression between Muslims and Christians, it was the Christians’ fault. And so it is that the epithet of choice that Islamic jihadists apply to their foes today is crusaders. Canny at public relations, the jihadists hope thereby to conjure up an image of aggressive Christian warriors forcing non-Christians to convert or expelling them from their lands and establishing a Christian theocracy.

  Islamic jihadists for years called American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan “Crusaders” and claimed that they were there as part of a war being waged by Christians against Islam. Confirmation of this came from an unlikely source in January 2011, when the acclaimed journalist Seymour Hersh, speaking in Qatar, charged that retired General Stanley McChrystal and military personnel currently serving in special operations units were part of a secret cabal bent on waging a new Crusade against Muslims: “They do see what they’re doing—and this is not an atypical attitude among some military—it’s a crusade, literally,” Hersh asserted. “They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the thirteenth century. And this is their function.”7

  If McChrystal and others really considered themselves to be “the protectors of the Christians” from Islamic jihad attacks, they were failing dismally at their task. There is, of course, no new Crusade, but Christians in Muslim lands are being victimized more relentlessly and brutally today than they have been for centuries.

  Egyptian Catholic spokesman Fr. Rafic Greische told Vatican Radio in December 2010 that “Muslim fundamentalists

  . . . want the Christians to evacuate from the Middle East and leave. And this is what is happening every day.”8 From Egypt to Nigeria, from Iraq to Pakistan, Christians in majority-Muslim countries face a grimmer present and a more uncertain future than ever as Islamic jihadists step up their efforts to Islamize them, to drive them out of their lands—or to kill them outright.

  Still, the world generally continues to avert its eyes. Fearful of offending Muslim sensibilities, the international community has largely ignored this persecution, allowing it to continue under the cover of darkness. Thus unchallenged, Muslim persecution of Christians has become a drearily familiar narrative, repeated with increasingly terrifying frequency in Muslim-controlled areas throughout the world.

  Moreover, this religious bigotry, hatred, and violence are legitimized by holy writ: the Qur’an and other Islamic texts and teachings. Nowhere else does religious bigotry have such bloody consequences. And yet, nowhere else does such religious bigotry take place almost entirely without comment, let alone condemnation, from the human rights community.

  Emblematic of how the mainstream media, and in turn human rights organizations, gloss over the harsh reality of Christian persecution is a January 2011 Associated Press story. When machete-wielding Muslims brutally murdered six Christians in Nigeria in January 2011, AP’s headline was “6 dead in religion-torn central Nigerian region,” as if the cause of the problem was “sectarian strife” that was the equal responsibility of both sides. The lead paragraph read: “Authorities say machete-wielding attackers have killed six people in two attacks on Christian villages in central Nigeria.”9 Although the victims were identified, the attackers were not until later in the story, and then only in the context of their retaliating against an earlier attack upon Muslims by Christians. And indeed, Christians have fought back in Nigeria, but Islamic jihadists are the aggressors and created the conflict. One would never, however, get that idea from the Associated Press.

  Human rights organizations give only perfunctory recognition to such outrages, and world leaders yawn. Christians are not fashionable or politically correct victims.

  Before the Gulf War, some estimates held the number of Christians in Iraq to be approaching a million or more; but since 2003, over half of Iraq’s prewar Christians have fled the country. This is not to suggest that the brutal regime of Saddam Hussein was particularly hospitable to Iraqi Christians; even in the relatively secular Iraq of Saddam, where Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz was a Chaldean Catholic Christian, the small Christian community faced random violence from the Muslim majority. Aside from outbreaks of actual persecution, including murder, Christians were routinely pressured to renounce their religion and to marry
Muslims.10

  But now the situation has grown exponentially worse. Saddam did not enforce the fullness of Islamic law mandating the subjugation of Christians; now, numerous armed groups are determined to do so, or to punish those Christians who do not submit. Jihadists bombed forty Iraqi churches between 2004 and 2011—seven on a single day, Orthodox Christmas Eve 2007.11 The most notorious attack came on October 31, 2010, a Sunday, when jihadists stormed the crowded Our Lady of Salvation church in Baghdad and began murdering worshippers in cold blood. Sixty-eight people were killed.12

  The situation of Christians in Egypt is no better. Late in 2010 Copts in Egypt experienced an unprecedented reign of terror. An Islamic suicide bomber murdered twenty-two people and wounded eighty more at the Coptic Christian Church of the Saints in Alexandria, Egypt on New Year’s Eve.13 Just days later in 2011, as Christmas (which Copts celebrate on January 7) approached, an Islamic website carried this ominous exhortation: “Blow up the churches while they are celebrating Christmas or any other time when the churches are packed.”14

  Islamic authorities in Egypt are generally disinclined to discuss the plight of Christians there. When Pope Benedict XVI spoke out in January 2011 against the persecution of Christians in Egypt and elsewhere in the Middle East, Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the world’s most prestigious Sunni Muslim institution, reacted angrily, breaking off dialogue with the Vatican and accusing the Pope of interference in internal Egyptian affairs. In a statement, Al-Azhar denounced the pontiff’s “repeated negative references to Islam and his claims that Muslims persecute those living among them in the Middle East.”15 This was not the first time Al-Azhar had moved against those who decried the persecution of Christians in Egypt rather than against the persecutors: Just weeks before taking issue with the Pope’s statements, Al-Azhar demanded that Copts repudiate a U.S. report on Coptic persecution.16 The Mubarak government of Egypt, meanwhile, recalled its ambassador to the Vatican.17