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

by Robert Spencer

  Professor Kreeft: This is true, this is true. But my Muslim student would not deny that, but he said, “If we had pictures, which we don’t because they are blasphemous and idolatrous, if we had pictures we would defend them to the death.” Now, here’s my question for you: What do you think of this? This same student once asked to go to Mass with me. I was surprised, and he said, “Don’t get me wrong, I have absolutely no intention of becoming a Catholic or anything or that I’m even interested in this—it’s pure curiosity, but I promise to be respectful.” So we went to Mass together and he just sat there like a stone, he wouldn’t move, he wouldn’t rise, or kneel, or in any way cooperate, but he was very quiet and respectful and afterwards I said to him, “What did you think?”

  And he said two things that impressed me. The first was—this was in St. Mary’s Chapel, which was a beautiful little stone Gothic chapel on B.C. [Boston College] campus—he said, “How old is this building?” I said, “Well, it’s over a hundred years old, it’s the oldest building on the B.C. campus back in nineteenth century.” And he said, “How old are the words that the priest uttered?” And I said, “Well, half of those were his own interpolations—

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: “—and half of them were a sort of revision of the Church’s liturgy which was translated a couple of years ago. But the structure of the Mass goes back to the beginning, while the actual words are fairly modern words.” He said, “I thought so.” I said, “Why?” I knew he knew nothing about Catholic tradition. He said, “Well, when I looked at the building, the stones brought my spirit closer to Heaven, but when I listened to the words, they were rather like shallow, babbling brooks moving on the surface of the Earth.” I thought that was rather perceptive.

  And then, then he said, “Do you Christians really believe that Jesus is literally the Son of God?” I said, “Yes, the orthodox ones do, the modernists don’t, the liberals don’t, but both Protestants and Catholics believe that.” And he said, “And the difference between Protestants and Catholics is you Catholics also believe that when that priest holds up that little round piece of bread, that really turns into Jesus, literally?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “And that’s why everybody got very quiet then?” I said, “Yes, that was worship; that was adoration.” And I said, “I know you think that’s blasphemous and ridiculous, and Protestants do, too, except for Anglicans and Lutherans, who believe in the Real Presence.”

  (By the way, one of the things that made me a Catholic—I was born and brought up as a Calvinist—was reading the Church Fathers and how they never questioned the Real Presence for a thousand years. I said, “How could God allow such an error to exist in the Church for a thousand years? I mean, bowing down and worshipping bread and wine thinking it’s God? That’s really bad!”)

  So he said, “So you Catholics believe that that is really Jesus and that Jesus is really Allah, fully divine?” I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  And I said, “Well, I don’t expect you to believe it, it’s a difficult thing to believe, but of course you’re a Muslim, you don’t believe that.” He said, “That’s not what I mean. I—I—I don’t want to tell you what I mean, it’s too embarrassing.” So I tried to be nice and said, “Well, I suppose you mean you can’t ever imagine doing what the other people did, the other Catholics, namely, getting down on your knees before what merely seemed to be a piece of bread.”

  He said, “No, that’s not what I mean.” He said, “I try to imagine myself believing that—which I of course never would, it’s blasphemous—but I don’t really think that you believe it.” “Why not?” “Well—” And he stopped again, saying, “I don’t want to insult you.” I said, “I have thick skin, try.” So I said, “You can’t imagine yourself ever getting down on your knees?” And he said, “No, I can’t imagine myself, if I believed that, ever getting up off my knees again.”

  Now there’s seriousness there. There’s something there, directed to a wrong object and a wrong religion, which I think we can learn some profound lessons from.

  Mr. Spencer: Well, that’s actually the question before us, then. The question is not really, “Are there pious Muslims?” or “Are there pious people who are Muslims?” That’s manifest, that’s obvious, that’s easy. The question before us, as far as I understand it, is whether Islamic piety really is something in accord with the best elements of the human spirit and whether it exalts it or whether it degrades it ultimately, if somebody follows it out.

  Professor Kreeft: Wouldn’t you agree that the answer to that question has to be neither a simple yes nor a simple no, because there are obviously ingredients in Muslim piety which no Christian can rightly agree with, and other ingredients in Muslim piety, equally important and equally orthodox, which every Christian must agree with?

  Mr. Spencer: Well, I guess what I would say to that is—

  Professor Kreeft: That’s the heart and soul of Islam itself: total surrender and submission to God, which is the formula for a saint.

  Mr. Spencer: Yes, absolutely, and as you very ably pointed out in your book, that’s something that is common to Judaism and Christianity. It’s not something that was originated in Islam, and so I find myself agreeing, I must say, with the Byzantine Emperor Manuel Palaiologos, who was quoted so famously by Pope Benedict XVI a few years back, touching off worldwide riots and murders of innocent people when he quoted him saying: “There was nothing that was new or original that Muhammad brought that was not evil and inhuman.” There’s plenty of good in the Qur’an that’s taken from Judaism and Christianity. Where it becomes problematic is where it departs from that. Now, we can see that, because we’re standing outside it and we understand—probably most of the people in this room know a great deal about Christianity and some of you about Judaism as well, and of course Judaism and Christianity come from the same wellsprings and are very similar in many important ways. Now, that is something we know then when we see these elements of Islam: that they are separable conceptually from the rest, but for Muslims these things are all a whole. Like you mentioned for an example the Sufis, that the Sufis have a wonderful spirituality. They do have a wonderful spirituality and in my first book, Islam Unveiled, I quote in its entirety a poem written by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was very deeply influenced by Sufism. Now, the Ayatollah Khomeini also said, “I spit on the foolish souls” who believe that Islam is a religion of peace. He didn’t have any trouble having these mystical flights that exalted his soul and also thinking that it was part of the Muslim’s responsibility to take up arms against unbelievers. And there was no separation: It was all considered to be part of the devoutness of his observance. The Sufis for several hundred years have been at the forefront of the armed jihad warfare in Chechnya against the Russians. Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, who I mentioned before, was very influenced by the Sufis, and as he was establishing this violent arm of political Islam he prescribed various Sufi exercises for members of the Brotherhood. Also al-Ghazali, one of the foremost Sufis in history, is very, very clear that Jews and Christians must be fought against and subjugated. He had no trouble seeing these two things together. So once again I have to come back to the topic: The only good Muslim is a bad Muslim. It’s perhaps a little coarse and insulting way to put it, as I explained before—but nonetheless, it contains a truth, that there are elements of Islamic piety that are not separable from the rest, that are deeply embedded within the religion itself, within the core teachings of the Qur’an and of Muhammad, that lead one not toward God nor any authentic spirituality but toward absolute evil.

  Professor Kreeft: Would you agree, though, at least that there are things in Islam that they have learned from Jews and Christians—not new things, the Emperor is perfectly right—that we have forgotten and that therefore we can relearn from them?

  Mr. Spencer: Insofar as they are the Jewish and Christian traditions, then certainly, we should look to any pious people and say that piety is a good thi
ng and ought to be fostered; I’m not sure we need to go to them to rediscover that kind of thing. There’s plenty within our own traditions that would do that for us if we would simply recover those.

  Professor Kreeft: Yes, okay. I don’t think we disagree about very much.

  Professor Zmirak: Mr. Spencer, you say that the only good Muslim is a bad Muslim. Presumably you mean “good” for us as Christians living in the West—in other words, “good,” as to our benefit, to our safety, promoting our freedom, our ability to worship, evangelize, live in peace. But if you hope that Muslims are not true to their own religion and are not true to their own conscience, then aren’t you hoping that they are disobeying the voice of conscience and therefore damning their own souls? Isn’t that a perverse thing for us to hope for, and isn’t it a little crass to hope that Muslims go to hell just because it makes them less likely to kill us?

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: It’s a wonderful question, but I think there’s a bit of sophistry there. I don’t think that God, that the true, living, existing God who is God of all creation, would ever condemn someone to hell for doing evil that he thought was the right thing or doing the right thing that he thought was evil. There is absolute good and absolute evil. These things are clear; these things are actually relatively universal across religious traditions, with the notable exception of Islam. In The Abolition of Man, C. S. Lewis’s book, he has an appendix, a listing of various quotations establishing what he calls the Tao, the Way. What he is explaining are universally held moral principles among Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. Very notably absent are quotations from the Qur’an and from the teachings of Muhammad that would support these otherwise universal moral principles: “Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal,” and so on and so on. Islam does uphold those things, but for Muslims only. Pretty much, all the [positive] things the media says about Islam are true if you add “for Muslims” at the end. “Islam is a religion of peace ‘for Muslims.’” “Islam is a religion of tolerance ‘for Muslims,’” and so on. So the point is that when we’re talking about people following their conscience, there’s a great danger, I think, the great danger of hellfire for anyone, the great danger is to become convinced that to do evil is good. And thus we should do everything we can to show them that that is a demonic deception.

  Professor Kreeft: I think it is very probable indeed that it is a demonic deception, and I think it is very probable that the Qur’an is a mixture of three things. It claims to be a divine revelation; it could conceivably come from three and only three sources: the human, the demonic, or the divine. In the Catholic tradition, private revelations are not infallible; the devil loves to mess up private revelations to confuse even the saints to get whatever falsehood he can in with truths. It seems to me in the Qur’an you have a mixture of divine revelation at least influenced by, if not totally derived from, Judaism and Christianity, but maybe, maybe God sent an angel to Muhammad to get some messages through, and maybe a few of them got through, I don’t know.

  Mr. Spencer: So are you saying that Islam is on par with private revelation like Fatima?

  Professor Kreeft: No, no, I’m saying that there may be some supernatural good as well as supernatural evil in the experience that Muhammad claims to have had in that cave mixed with Muhammad’s own very human proclivities to a mixture of good and evil. Which would explain the mixture.

  Mr. Spencer: Well, I don’t know. I go back to the cave, and the very earliest hadith, the very earliest traditions about Muhammad, are all about what happened to him in that cave. It’s very fascinating, because if you were a Muslim going to Muslim school to learn about Islam, then you would learn that Muhammad was praying in a cave, and the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him to recite, and he recited. That’s what ‘Qur’an’ means, recitation. And over the next twenty-three years he was given recitations to recite that were the words of God, the word of God, the perfect and eternal word of God that had existed forever with God in Paradise and was then being transmitted to Earth through Gabriel to Muhammad. Now, that’s a very nice story, that’s sort of the Sunday-school version, or, we could say, the Friday-school version.

  But in the actual hadith about the incident, the angel is not named as an angel or as Gabriel. He is some sort of spiritual being who then presses Muhammad very hard on his chest so that he thought he was going to die and tells him to recite. And he says, “I can’t, I can’t read!” because he was thinking he would have to go get a printed text or written text and then recite it. And he presses him even harder and all the breath is going out of him! He’s like a cosmic thug pressing on Muhammad, forcing him and saying, “Recite!” And finally Muhammad says “OK, OK!” and he goes home, and he’s shaking with fear, and he says to his wife, “Cover me with a blanket,” because he’s shivering, and he says, “Woe is me, either poet or possessed.” By poet he didn’t mean Rod McKuen, he meant like someone who is receiving ecstatic demonic visions. And so, is that really the kind of story we would expect if it was Gabriel, the one who appeared to the Blessed Mother in the Gospel of Luke and tells her she’s going to be the Mother of Jesus? It’s a very different kind of story; it’s a very different character of story. And I think that, in itself, is very telling and revealing.

  Professor Kreeft: It sounds suspiciously like some of the disturbing stories in some of the early parts of the Old Testament.

  Mr. Spencer: I don’t know that there’s any comparable story in the Old Testament. I appreciate the—

  Professor Kreeft: Jacob wrestling with the angel?

  Mr. Spencer: But what does the angel do to Jacob that would terrify him to thinking he’s demon possessed?

  Professor Kreeft: He breaks his hipbone.

  Mr. Spencer: Jacob doesn’t go home and say, “I think I’ve just been demon possessed!,” does he?

  Professor Zmirak: Dr. Kreeft, couldn’t we learn what we need to learn from Muslims by reading their books—but nevertheless energetically fighting their attempts to assert themselves in American society, restricting their entrance into our countries and just generally fighting political Islam and protecting our own religious freedom and our own political freedom by aggressively imposing our own values on our own societies? In other words, not permitting them polygamy, not permitting them honor killing or wife beating or any of the other aspects of sharia that they claim to be asserting and in some cases are trying to assert in the legal system as in Great Britain; couldn’t we get all this from your book? Your book tells us what we need to gain from Islam and so, “OK, fine, they can go home now.”

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: The long and complete and nuanced version of my answer to your question is yes.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Zmirak: We might actually agree more than I realized.

  Mr. Spencer: Yes.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: On the other hand, on the other hand, I would not necessarily condemn the idea of a foundation which arose and came up with this flaky proposal. The Clash of Civilizations, Islam vs. the West, could be at least mitigated if not overcome if we simply spent some millions of dollars buying a fleet of planes and using them for a kind of double-transportation system. Let’s take all our pop psychologists and put them in Muslim countries, and let’s tell them to send us some fiery mullahs to give us some spine.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Zmirak: I like that idea better than the one [Israeli] Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu once expressed in the Knesset, that they should translate Sex and the City into Persian and drop the DVDs all across Iran.

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: What the mullahs would do if they were imported here—I mean, we’re already seeing what’s happening, so I don’t think that that really would necessarily be a good idea. But it’s interesting to note also in terms of secularism and Islam that a lot of people have the idea that—and this is absolutely germane to the point of tonight’s discussion that the only good Muslim
is a bad Muslim—it might not even be so that a bad Muslim is a good Muslim. Because secularism has often been posited as an antidote to all this as in, “Well, they’re so pious, and their piety leads them into dangerous and violent directions, so therefore we have to make them less pious, so we’ll airlift Sex and the City into Iran or whatever.” But actually, you know, American culture is already there. And there is plenty of Sex and the City all over the Islamic world, make no mistake. Charles Glass was an American journalist who wrote a very fascinating book called Tribes with Flags in the ’80s; the book Tribes with Flags is an account of his crazy decision to walk from Antioch in southern Turkey to Cairo, down Lebanon into Israel all the way down. And of course in Lebanon he was kidnapped by Hezbollah and held as a hostage. And while he was there, he found that his captors were listening to Michael Jackson records and Madonna. They would come up to him and they would say, “Do you think American girls would find me attractive?”