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

by Robert Spencer

  “There is no compulsion in religion,” certainly. Non-Muslims are not forced to become Muslim. But under the stipulations of traditional Islamic law, failure to convert would make their lives so miserable that they do convert simply to be able to live life with some dignity and hope. When Muslim forces conquered Egypt in the seventh century, it was 99 percent Christian; now, 1,400 years later, it is around 10 percent Christian. The Christians of Egypt did not emigrate; they are the ancestors of the Muslims of Egypt. Though most were not forced at sword point, over the centuries most of Egypt’s population converted to Islam to escape the institutionalized discrimination of dhimmitude. And so it was with non-Muslim populations all over the Islamic world.

  That the thirty-eight scholars who wrote to the pope do not mention this, but rather give the impression that Islam allows for the freedom of conscience and for non-Muslims to practice their religions freely and unhindered, does not speak well of their sincerity. And unfortunately, this was by no means the only instance of disingenuousness in their letter.

  Allah as absolute will?

  The scholars disparaged the pope’s reference to Ibn Hazm dismissing him as a marginal figure in Islamic thought, and asserting “to conclude that Muslims believe in a capricious God who might or might not command us to evil is to forget that God says in the Quran, “Lo! God enjoins justice and kindness, and giving to kinsfolk, and forbids lewdness and abomination and wickedness. He exhorts you in order that ye may take heed (al-Nahl, 16:90).”

  Yet what Ibn Hazm said was not exactly that Allah might command the Muslims to do evil. The pope characterized his views thusly at Regensburg: “Were it God’s will, we would even have to practice idolatry.” This would not be to command evil; it is, rather, a complete nominalism in which the appellations “good” and “evil” are applied arbitrarily and have nothing to do with the nature of the things to which they are applied. In Islam, as we have seen again and again, what is good is not a matter of the intrinsic nature of a thing; what makes something good is Allah’s fiat. The premier example of this is the exaltation of Muhammad as the “excellent example” (Qur’an 33:21) for believers. Although in a few places in the Qur’an Allah upbraids Muhammad for his sin, and Islamic tradition regards only Jesus and Mary as sinless, nevertheless all the sects and schools of Islam hold Muhammad in such high esteem that essentially if he did something, it is good to do, and Muslims must imitate him. This is not so much to say that Muhammad, or Allah, might command something that is against the absolute moral law; it is to say that there is no absolute moral law, save what Allah commands or Muhammad exemplifies.

  The same rejection of absolutes occurs in Islamic cosmology. The twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides described the Islamic thinkers with whom he was in contact as rejecting absolutes as illegitimately binding upon Allah’s will:

  Human intellect does not perceive any reason why a body should be in a certain place instead of being in another. In the same manner [the Muslim philosophers] say that reason admits the possibility that an existing being should be larger or smaller than it really is, or that it should be different in form and position from what it really is; e.g., a man might have the height of a mountain, might have several heads, and fly in the air; or an elephant might be as small as an insect, or an insect as huge as an elephant.

  This method of admitting possibilities is applied to the whole Universe. Whenever they affirm that a thing belongs to this class of admitted possibilities, they say that it can have this form and that it is also possible that it be found differently, and that the one form is not more possible than the other; but they do not ask whether the reality confirms their assumption.

  [They say] fire causes heat, water causes cold, in accordance with a certain habit; but it is logically not impossible that a deviation from this habit should occur, namely, that fire should cause cold, move downward, and still be fire; that the water should cause heat, move upward, and still be water. On this foundation their whole [intellectual] fabric is constructed.191

  The abandonment of reason

  In the scholars’ critique of the pope’s remarks about the importance of reason, they insisted that “the Islamic tradition is rich in its explorations of the nature of human intelligence and its relation to God’s Nature and His Will, including questions of what is self-evident and what is not,” and that “Muslims have come to terms with the power and limits of human intelligence in their own way, acknowledging a hierarchy of knowledge of which reason is a crucial part.” They said that Islamic tradition has ably avoided two extremes: “one is to make the analytical mind the ultimate arbiter of truth, and the other is to deny the power of human understanding to address ultimate questions.”

  The outcomes of two controversies, however—the defeat of the Mu‘tazilites at the hands of those who held that the Qur’an was eternal and uncreated, and al-Ghazali’s undoing of the philosophers for their reliance on reason rather than the Qur’an—demonstrate that reason has not always enjoyed the respect in the Islamic world that these scholars suggest. An apocryphal story about the caliph Umar sums up an attitude that has always been prevalent in the Islamic world. Umar, after conquering Egypt, is said to have ordered the burning of the fabled Library of Alexandria. When asked why, he responded: “If the books in it agree with the Qur’an, they are superfluous. If they disagree with the Qur’an, they are heretical.” Only one book was needed.

  The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci wrote forcefully about the all-too-common Muslim tendency to reject reason:

  Islam has always persecuted and silenced its intelligent men. I remind you of Averroes who for his distinction between Faith and Reason was accused of heterodoxy by the caliphs and forced to flee. Then, imprisoned like a criminal. Then, confined to his home and humiliated to such a degree that when rehabilitated he no longer had any desire to live and died within a few months. Not without good reason, in his famous lecture held in 1883 at the Sorbonne, Ernest Renan said that attributing the merits of Averroes to Islam would be like attributing the merits of Galileo to the Inquisition.192

  Here again, the scholars were not to be expected to have said, “Yes, Holy Father, the Islamic faith disparages and denigrates human reason,” but they would have inspired more confidence in the genuineness of their appeal to him had they at least acknowledged that his statements were not actually “errors” at all but reasonable and accurate summations of genuine tendencies within Islamic thought.

  Jihad and the unbelievers

  The same problem recurs in the scholars’ discussion of jihad, about which they accused the pope of contradicting his own faith: “It is noteworthy that Manuel II Paleologus says that ‘violence’ goes against God’s nature, since Christ himself used violence against the money-changers in the temple, and said ‘Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword’ (Matt. 10:34-36). When God drowned Pharaoh, was He going against His own Nature? Perhaps the emperor meant to say that cruelty, brutality, and aggression are against God’s Will, in which case the classical and traditional law of jihad in Islam would bear him out completely.”

  They summarize “the authoritative and traditional Islamic rules of war” as including the principle that “religious belief alone does not make anyone the object of attack” and that “the original Muslim community was fighting against pagans who had also expelled them from their homes, persecuted, tortured, and murdered them. Thereafter, the Islamic conquests were political in nature.” They insist that “Muslims can and should live peacefully with their neighbors,” although “this does not exclude legitimate self-defense and maintenance of sovereignty.”

  That all sounds so . . . reasonable. Unfortunately, it doesn’t jibe either with Islamic texts or with Islamic law.

  The Qur’an contains numerous exhortations to fight against the infidels, as do all the hadith collections of Muhammad’s words and deeds. It directs Muslims to “fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day
and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden—such men as practice not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book—until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled” (9:29), which sounds as if religious belief alone makes these people the object of attack. Nor does Muhammad mention any other pretext for an attack when he expands upon this passage with more detailed instructions on fighting against unbelievers:

  Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war; do not embezzle the spoils; do not break your pledge; and do not mutilate (the dead) bodies; do not kill the children. When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these you also accept it and withhold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. . . . If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the jizya. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.193

  This triple imperative of conversion, subjugation, or death is reinforced in Islamic law. One manual of Islamic law that some of Sunni Islam’s foremost authorities have certified as conforming to the “practice and faith of the orthodox Sunni community” states flatly that the “lesser jihad” means “war against non-Muslims.”194 The Muslim community is directed to make war “upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians . . . until they become Muslim or pay the non-Muslim poll tax.”195

  Most Muslims are Sunnis. There are four schools of Sunni Muslim jurisprudence: the Shafi’i, Hanafi, Hanbali, and Maliki. The legal manual quoted above originated with the Shafi’i school; a Hanafi authority, meanwhile, directly contradicts the scholars, specifically explaining jihad as a religious war. The infidels must first be called to embrace Islam, “because the Prophet so instructed his commanders, directing them to call the infidels to the faith.” It states that Muslims must not wage jihad in order to enrich themselves but only for the cause of Islam. And when the infidels hear the call to Islam, they “will hence perceive that they are attacked for the sake of religion, and not for the sake of taking their property, or making slaves of their children, and on this consideration it is possible that they may be induced to agree to the call, in order to save themselves from the troubles of war.”196

  However, things will go badly for the non-Muslims who choose not to convert or pay the tax. Muslims must “make war upon them, because God is the assistant of those who serve Him, and the destroyer of His enemies, the infidels, and it is necessary to implore His aid upon every occasion; the Prophet, moreover, commands us so to do.”197

  Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a Maliki jurist as well as a pioneering historian and philosopher who authored one of the first works of historiography, likewise notes “in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force.” Islam is “under obligation to gain power over other nations.”198 And the Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) directed that “since lawful warfare is essentially jihad and since its aim is that the religion is God’s entirely and God’s word is uppermost, therefore according to all Muslims, those who stand in the way of this aim must be fought.”199

  These are old authorities, but none of these Sunni schools of jurisprudence have ever reformed or rejected these directives. For the scholars not to mention any of this, and to represent jihad warfare solely as a matter of “legitimate self-defense and maintenance of sovereignty,” is hard to see as anything but deceptive.

  Nonetheless, the scholars declared that they share the pope’s “desire for frank and sincere dialogue.” They expressed a wish to “build peaceful and friendly relationships based upon mutual respect, justice, and what is common in essence in our shared Abrahamic tradition, particularly ‘the two greatest commandments’ in Mark 12:29-31 (and, in varying form, in Matthew 22:37-40), that the Lord our God is One Lord; / And thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy understanding, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. / And the second commandment is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these.”

  It is odd that the scholars should cite the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” as part of a shared tradition with Christianity, since nowhere does that commandment appear in Islam. Rather, as we have seen, the Qur’an says, “Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another.” This dichotomy runs through the entirety of Islam. One may be merciful to one’s fellow Muslims. But toward those outside, the believer must behave quite differently: “O believers, fight the unbelievers who are near to you; and let them find in you a harshness” (9:123).

  A Common Word

  A year after this flawed and arguably deceptive letter appeared, 138 Muslim leaders and scholars from all over the globe issued a more extensive appeal to Christians for mutual understanding, entitled A Common Word Between Us and You. The “Common Word” initiative is quite extensive, with ongoing conferences and other mutual endeavors between Muslims and Catholics, as well as between Muslims and other Christian groups. The Common Word website describes the project in enthusiastic terms: “Never before have Muslims delivered this kind of definitive consensus statement on Christianity. Rather than engage in polemic, the signatories have adopted the traditional and mainstream Islamic position of respecting the Christian scripture and calling Christians to be more, not less, faithful to it.”200

  Following the pattern set by the earlier document, data contradicting the assertions in A Common Word Between Us and You are not addressed and refuted but simply ignored. Nothing is said, for example, about the Islamic claim that the Christian Scripture has been corrupted. While claiming they want to respect Christian Scripture and build on common ground, the Muslim scholars (despite copious Qur’an quotes) never mention Qur’an 5:17, which says that those who believe in the divinity of Christ are unbelievers; or 4:171, which says that Jesus was not crucified; or 9:30, which says that those who believe that Jesus is the Son of God are accursed; or 9:29, which mandates warfare against and the subjugation of Jews and Christians. Why should they mention these unpleasant passages in the midst of trying to build bridges? Because they are precisely the obstacles to such bridges. For there to be any true and honest dialogue, verses like these must be addressed in some way, even if only to give them a benign interpretation.

  When Blessed John Paul II died, the Washington Post reminded its readers how “during his long reign, Pope John Paul II apologized to Muslims for the Crusades, to Jews for anti-Semitism, to Orthodox Christians for the sacking of Constantinople, to Italians for the Vatican’s associations with the Mafia and to scientists for the persecution of Galileo.”201 In reality, he never apologized for the Crusades; the closest he came was on March 12, 2000, the “Day of Pardon,” when he said, “[W]e cannot fail to recognize the infidelities to the Gospel committed by some of our brethren, especially during the second millennium. Let us ask pardon for the divisions which have occurred among Christians, for the violence some have used in the service of the truth and for the distrustful and hostile attitudes sometimes taken towards the followers of other religions.”202

  Though it’s hardly an “apology for the Crusades,” nonetheless one would be hard pressed to find a similar statement from any Muslim leader, still less one of the pope’s supreme stature, acknowledging any wrongdoing on the part of Muslims individually or of any Islamic state. The idea of a Muslim asking pardon and forgiveness from a non-Muslim is anathema to Islamic theology. But some kind of reciprocity of this kind would seem necessary for genuine dialogue.

  Reading the entire Qur’anic verse from which the phrase “a common word between us and you” was taken makes cle
ar the Common Word initiative’s agenda: “Say: ‘People of the Book! Come now to a word common between us and you, that we serve none but God, and that we associate not aught with Him, and do not some of us take others as Lords, apart from God.’ And if they turn their backs, say: ‘Bear witness that we are Muslims’” (3:64). Since Muslims consider the Christian confession of the divinity of Christ to be an unacceptable association of a partner with God, this verse is saying that the “common word” that Muslims and the People of the Book should agree on is that Christians should discard one of the central tenets of their faith and essentially become Muslims.

  Not a promising basis for an honest and mutually respectful dialogue of equals. The Common Word document’s explanation for this was disingenuous, not mentioning that according to the mainstream Islamic understanding of what it means to “ascribe a partner to God,” the Christians were guilty of this sin:

  The words: we shall ascribe no partner unto Him relate to the Unity of God, and the words: worship none but God, relate to being totally devoted to God. Hence they all relate to the First and Greatest Commandment. According to one of the oldest and most authoritative commentaries on the Holy Qur’an the words: that none of us shall take others for lords beside God, mean “that none of us should obey the other in disobedience to what God has commanded.” This relates to the Second Commandment because justice and freedom of religion are a crucial part of love of the neighbour.

  “Being totally devoted to God” is a drastically inadequate summation of what Islam’s understanding of monotheism really is, and how it relates to Christianity. Islam may preach “total submission of the human will to the divine will,” to use Kreeft’s phrase,203 but Jesus said, “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you” (John 15:15). Catholics do indeed submit to God, but as a child does to a loving father, not as a slave does to a capricious and angry master. Christian submission is to a God who is good, and who—with no implied limitations on his power or freedom—is not the author of evil.