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

by Robert Spencer

  Yet a very different message comes through in a curious Qur’anic passage in which Allah swears by various kinds of stars in the night sky (“slinkers,”“runners,” and “sinkers”) that the message of his prophet is reliable:

  No! I swear by the slinkers,

  the runners, the sinkers,

  by the night swarming,

  by the dawn sighing,

  truly this is the word of a noble Messenger

  having power, with the Lord of the Throne secure,

  obeyed, moreover trusty.

  Your companion is not possessed;

  he truly saw him on the clear horizon;

  he is not niggardly of the Unseen.

  And it is not the word of an accursed Satan;

  where then are you going?

  It is naught but a Reminder unto all beings,

  for whosoever of you who would go straight;

  but will you shall not, unless God wills, the Lord of all Being. (81:15-29)

  This message from a “noble Messenger” and not “the word of an accursed Satan” will profit “whosoever of you who would go straight” (81:28), but no one can “unless God wills” (81:29).

  There are numerous other passages of the Qur’an, as well as indications from Islamic tradition, to the effect that not only can no one believe in Allah except by his will, no one can disbelieve in him except by his active will. “And to whomsoever God assigns no light, no light has he” (24:40).

  The issue of free will versus predestination has, of course, vexed Catholics and Protestants for centuries, as different biblical passages are given different weight in various traditions. Calvinism, of course, in its pure form is notorious for its doctrine of double predestination, the idea that God has destined people for hell as well as for salvation. But this position is largely unique to them in the Christian tradition, which generally holds that God desires all to be saved and gives everyone the means to attain this salvation. The idea that God would create men for hell contradicts the proposition that God “desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim. 2:4) and that he “takes no pleasure in the death of anyone” (Ezek. 18:32).

  The situation in Islam is, on first glance, even worse, with the Qur’an’s testimony on this, as on other matters, appearing to be hopelessly contradictory. The Qur’an, says the Qur’an, is “naught but a Reminder unto all beings, for whosoever of you who would go straight; but will you shall not, unless God wills, the Lord of all Being” (81:27-29). Those who would “go straight”—follow Allah’s straight path—cannot do so “unless God wills.”

  This does not depart significantly from the Catholic understanding that no soul can approach God without having received the grace to do so. However, the Qur’an goes much further than that, into a more or less open determinism: “If God had willed, He would have made you one nation; but He leads astray whom He will, and guides whom He will; and you will surely be questioned about the things you wrought” (16:93). Even though everything is in Allah’s hands, even the decision of the individual to obey him or not—for he leads astray those whom he wills, and guides to the truth whom he wills—human beings will still be held accountable for the things they have done.

  The Qur’an repeats this idea many times: Those who have rejected Allah do so because he made it possible for them to do nothing else. And indeed, given the fact that in the Islamic scheme of creation and salvation, human beings are the slaves of Allah, not his children, the rejection of free will is not altogether surprising. Allah tells Muhammad that “some of them there are that listen to thee, and We lay veils upon their hearts lest they understand it, and in their ears heaviness; and if they see any sign whatever, they do not believe in it, so that when they come to thee they dispute with thee, the unbelievers saying, ‘This is naught but the fairy-tales of the ancient ones’” (6:25-6).

  Elsewhere in the Qur’an, Allah describes this veil as a seal and as a barrier, saying to his prophet: “As for the unbelievers, alike it is to them whether thou hast warned them or hast not warned them, they do not believe. God has set a seal on their hearts and on their hearing, and on their eyes is a covering, and there awaits them a mighty chastisement” (2:6-7). The medieval Islamic scholar Ibn Kathir (1301-1372), whose commentary on the Qur’an is still enormously influential among Muslims, says in his commentary on this Qur’anic passage: “These Ayat [verses] indicate that whomever Allah has written to be miserable, they shall never find anyone to guide them to happiness, and whomever Allah directs to misguidance, he shall never find anyone to guide him.”64And elsewhere in the Qur’an: “And We have put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier; and We have covered them, so they do not see. Alike it is to them whether thou hast warned them or thou hast not warned them, they do not believe. Thou only warnest him who follows the Remembrance and who fears the All-merciful in the Unseen; so give him the good tidings of forgiveness and a generous wage” (36:9-11).

  If the prophet succeeds in warning only the one “who follows the Remembrance and who fears the All-merciful in the Unseen,” it would appear that the only people who will heed the call of Islam are those who have already been destined to do so: those who already in some way “fear the All-Merciful.” There are even some to whom it doesn’t matter whether or not the prophet preaches, for even if they hear his message they will not believe it. Allah has made them blind to its truth: He has “put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier; and We have covered them, so they do not see.”

  The obstinate unbelief of those who reject Islam thus appears to be entirely in accord with the will of Allah. The Tafsir al-Jalalayn explains that this passage offers a “metaphor for how the path of faith is closed” to the unbelievers.65

  At first glance, this may seem to be not far from Jesus’ words: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: ‘You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them’” (Matt. 13:13-15).

  Indeed, Islamic tradition shares with Catholic tradition the idea that repeated defiance of God can render one’s soul insensitive to grace. That appears to be the case in many passages of the Qur’an, such as one recounting the reaction of hypocrites to a new revelation that Muhammad has delivered: “And whenever a sura is sent down, they look one at another: ‘Does anyone see you?’ Then they turn away. God has turned away their hearts, for that they are a people who do not understand” (9:127).

  But in Islam there is more. Another Qur’an commentary explains Qur’an 36:9 as meaning that Allah has “covered the insight of their hearts (so that they see not) the Truth and guidance.”66 Ibn Kathir, whose Qur’an commentary is one of the most widely respected among Muslims, records that one early Muslim also ascribed unbelief to Allah’s will: “Allah placed this barrier between them and Islam and Iman [faith], so that they will never reach it.”67

  Other Qur’an passages state this explicitly. “We have created for Gehenna,” Allah says in a Qur’anic passage that directly echoes Jesus’ quoting of Isaiah, “many jinn and men: they have hearts, but understand not with them; they have eyes, but perceive not with them; they have ears, but they hear not with them. They are like cattle; nay, rather they are further astray. Those—they are the heedless” (7:179).

  Despite the superficial similarity of the “eyes but see not and ears but hear not” motif, there is an immense gulf between this and the statement of Jesus, which most exegetes throughout the ages have taken to mean that some people harden themselves so in unbelief that when they hear the truth of God, they do not recognize it as such. In the Qur’anic passage, by contrast, Allah says that he actually created some people
(as well as the mysterious spirit beings known as jinn) for hell—a doctrine that is hard to reconcile with the idea of a just and loving God.

  Even as the Qur’an repeatedly affirms that no one can believe except by Allah’s will, it also affirms that unbelievers bear responsibility for their actions. In this passage these two propositions are placed side by side with no hint that there is any difficulty: “And those who break the covenant of God after His compact, and who snap what God has commanded to be joined, and who work corruption in the earth—theirs shall be the curse, and theirs the Evil Abode” (13:26).

  Thus far, we are in the realm of free will and personal responsibility. But then we read, “God outspreads and straitens His provision unto whomsoever He will. They rejoice in this present life; and this present life, beside the world to come, is naught but passing enjoyment” (13:27).

  If Allah “outspreads and straitens His provision unto whomsoever He will,” then the decision of whether someone will be a believer and be saved or an unbeliever and be damned is up to him. When asked why he hasn’t performed a miracle that would be a definitive sign that his message really is divine, Allah tells his messenger to say essentially that: “The unbelievers say, ‘Why has a sign not been sent down upon him from his Lord?’ Say: ‘God leads astray whomsoever He will, and He guides to Him all who are penitent’” (13:28).

  Allah shortly thereafter tells Muhammad: “Thus We have sent thee among a nation before which other nations have passed away, to recite to them that We have revealed to thee; and yet they disbelieve in the All-merciful. Say: ‘He is my Lord—there is no god but He. In Him I have put my trust, and to Him I turn’” (13:31). He dismisses the possibility that those who have rejected the Islamic message would accept it if they saw a great sign, and concludes by affirming that the decision to believe or not believe is entirely up to Allah:

  If only a Koran whereby the mountains were set in motion, or the earth were cleft, or the dead were spoken to—nay, but God’s is the affair altogether. Did not the believers know that, if God had willed, He would have guided men all together? And still the unbelievers are smitten by a shattering for what they wrought, or it alights nigh their habitation, until God’s promise comes; and God will not fail the tryst. (13:32)

  And again:

  Nay; but decked out fair to the unbelievers is their devising, and they are barred from the way; and whomsoever God leads astray, no guide has he. For them is chastisement in the present life; and the chastisement of the world to come is yet more grievous; they have none to defend them from God. (13:34-35)

  “They have none to defend them from God.”

  In the New Testament, it is God who defends human beings from the condemnation of the accuser, Satan. In the book of Revelation, Satan is referred to as “the accuser of our brethren” who “accuses them day and night before our God” (Rev. 12:10). But defending the brethren in the face of this accuser is God himself, by virtue of the cross of Jesus Christ. In the Qur’an, by contrast, the one whom Allah has decided to condemn has no one to defend him from the Almighty.

  The Qur’an even makes it clear that it did not have to be this way. Had Allah wanted it that way, everyone on earth would have believed in the true religion: “And if thy Lord had willed, whoever is in the earth would have believed, all of them, all together.” He chides his prophet about trying too hard to make these unbelievers believe, when Allah has already decreed that they would reject him: “Wouldst thou then constrain the people, until they are believers? It is not for any soul to believe save by the leave of God; and He lays abomination upon those who have no understanding” (10:99-100).

  Mainstream Muslim exegetes have interpreted these verses to mean exactly what they appear to mean. Says Ibn Kathir: “Allah has decreed that they will be misguided, so warning them will not help them and will not have any effect on them.”68

  In Islamic theological history, a party known as the Qadariyya tried to advance the concept of individual free will. The pioneering Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher explains that the Qadaryya were protesting against “an unworthy conception of God,” and yet they “could not find a large body of supporters” among Muslims. Their opponents “battled them with the received interpretation of the sacred scriptures.”69 And won. Ultimately, Muslim authorities declared the concept of human free will to be heretical.

  A twelfth-century Muslim jurist, Ibn Abi Ya’la, fulminated that the Qadariyya wrongly “consider that they hold in their grasp the ability to do good and evil, avoid harm and obtain benefit, obey and disobey, and be guided or misguided. They claim that human beings retain full initiative, without any prior status within the will of Allah for their acts, nor even in His knowledge of them.” Even worse, “their doctrine is similar to that of Zoroastrians and Christians. It is the very root of heresy.”70

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

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

  A God of both light and darkness

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

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

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

  Allah is will

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

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

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

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