Interestingly, Coptic Christians never use these expressions. Possibly due to centuries of Muslim harassment and persecution in Egypt, they replace the word Allah with Rabb (“Lord”). However, among Arabic-speaking Christians the Copts are an exception in this. Most use the same expressions that Muslims use, although not in reference to the God of the Qur’an but to the God of the Bible.
In any case, Catholics accept that Muslims and Catholics worship the same God above all because the Second Vatican Council says so.
The mind of the Church
Any examination of Islam and its relationship to Catholicism should, of course, be guided by the mind of the Church. And so we turn to the Second Vatican Council’s two statements on the Church’s relationship with Muslims.
The more important of these is the briefer one, both because it is found in a dogmatic constitution while the other is in a declaration, and because in its two sentences it contains more statements of fact. Lumen Gentium, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, tells us that the “plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator. In the first place amongst these there are the Mohammedans, who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, along with us adore the one and merciful God, who on the last day will judge mankind” (16).
Here it is almost more important to clarify what this text does not say than what it does. For the first statement, that “the plan of salvation also includes” Muslims, has led some—mostly critics of the Church—to assert that the Council Fathers are saying that Muslims are saved and thus need not be preached the gospel, as they’ve already got just as much of a claim on heaven as do Christians.
This is obviously false. This statement on Muslims comes as part of a larger passage that begins by speaking of “those who have not yet received the gospel” and concludes by reaffirming “the command of the Lord, ‘Preach the gospel to every creature.’” It speaks of the possibility of salvation for those who “through no fault of their own do not know the gospel of Christ or His Church, yet sincerely seek God and moved by grace strive by their deeds to do his will as it is known to them through the dictates of conscience.”
Clearly, then, Muslims figure in the “plan of salvation” not in the sense that they are saved as Muslims, that is, by means of Islamic observance, but insofar as they strive to be attentive to and to obey the authentic voice of the creator whom they acknowledge and who speaks to them through the dictates of their conscience. The conciliar statement also wisely adds the qualification that Muslims profess to hold the faith of Abraham. The Church does not definitively affirm that Muslims do actually hold that faith, but only notes that they believe they do.
In affirming Allah’s oneness, his omniscience and omnipotence, his mercy and judgment, Islam’s concept of God coincides with Christianity’s to an important degree. Thus, Peter Kreeft writes disapprovingly that “many Christians, both Protestant and Catholic, do not believe what the Church says about Islam . . . : that Allah is not another God, that we worship the same God.”57 Indeed, as far back as 1076 we find Pope St. Gregory VII writing to Anzir, the king of Mauritania, that “we believe and confess one God, although in different ways.”58
But although the Church affirms that Catholics and Muslims worship the same God, obviously this does not mean that we believe in the same God in every particular. For the teachings of Islam describe a God who, although one and powerful and a judge, is in other important respects substantially different from the God of the Bible and the Catholic faith. Catholics do not believe that Muhammad was a prophet or that the Qur’an is God’s word, and Muslims do not believe that Jesus is the son of God or the Savior of the world, or that God is triune, and so on. In declaring that both Muslims and Catholics together adore the one and merciful God, the council could not have meant that Muslims and Catholics regard God in exactly the same way, or that the differences are insignificant.
It would do no outrage to Lumen Gentium, then, to examine these differences carefully, and from them to speculate on the prospects for Catholic/Muslim cooperation.
The second Vatican II reference to Islam must be understood in light of that of the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church; it comes in the Declaration on Non-Christian Religions, Nostra Aetate:
The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all those who have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.
Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutual understanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind social justice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom. (Nostra Aetate 3)
Although this is a bit more descriptive about Muslim belief than is Lumen Gentium, as it includes the Islamic classification of Jesus as a non-divine prophet and Islam’s respect for the Virgin Mary, it adds nothing of substance to the dogmatic constitution’s statements about Muslims. Here again, we see the Church’s careful use of language: Islam’s identification with Abraham is presented not as fact, but as something Muslims claim, or “take pleasure” in claiming.
The rest of Catholic tradition on Islam
As Pope Benedict XVI has reminded us, Vatican II was not a super-council whose teachings superseded all previous Church teaching; rather, its teachings must be understood in light of tradition. “The council did not formulate anything new in matters of faith, nor did it wish to replace what was ancient,” he said in October 2012. “Rather, it concerned itself with seeing that the same faith might continue to be lived in the present day, that it might remain a living faith in a world of change.”59 When it comes to Islam, the consistent focus in earlier statements about Islam is generally not on what Muslims believe but on the hostility of Muslims to Christians and Christianity. In that vein, Pope Benedict XIV, in 1754, reaffirmed an earlier prohibition on Albanian Catholics giving their children “Turkish or Mohammedan names” in baptism by pointing out that not even Protestants or Orthodox were stooping so low: “None of the schismatics and heretics has been rash enough to take a Mohammedan name, and unless your justice abounds more than theirs, you shall not enter the kingdom of God.”60
Pope Callixtus III, in a somewhat similar spirit, in 1455 vowed to “exalt the true Faith, and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East.”61
Some Catholics will argue that the statements of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III (and other statements like them from other popes) simply reflect a very different age from our own, and moreover that Vatican II’s statements reflect a more mature spirit and a greater amount of the charity toward others that Christians ought to exhibit.
And that may well be so, although it must be noted that even though they are only fifty years old, the statements of Vatican II on Islam reflect the outlook of a vanished age no less than do those of the earlier popes. For in the 1960s, secularism and Westernization were very much the order of the day in many areas of the Islamic world. It was, for example, unusual in Cairo in the 1960s to see a woman wearing a hijab, an Islamic headscarf mandated by Muhammad’s command that when appearing in public a woman should cover everything except her face and hands. Today, on the other hand, one would be surprised on the streets of the same city to see a woman who is not so attired.
The hijabs in Cairo are but one visible sign of a revolution—or, more properly, a revival
—that has swept the Islamic world. Islamic values have been revived, including not only rigor in dress codes but also hostility toward Western ideas and principles. The “Arab Spring” uprisings that began late in 2010 have led to a reassertion of the political aspects of Islam, as opposed to Western political models, all across the Middle East. Western ideas of democracy and pluralism that were fashionable in elite circles all over the Islamic world in the first half of the twentieth century have fallen into disrepute.
In other words, the Islamic world that the Fathers of Vatican II had in mind is rapidly disappearing. What the Council affirms is true and demands our assent; however, the tone of these statements must be evaluated within the context of their times. For the documents of Vatican II are no less a product of their age than the statements of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III are a product of theirs. Just as the time of crusading knights has vanished, so has the time of a dominant secular West striding confidently into what it terms the “modern” age.
Although it will always be the Christian’s responsibility to reach out with respect and esteem to Muslims, the hostility that the Islamic world had always displayed toward Christendom was never—at any time before or since—less in evidence than it was in the 1960s, and so a statement of friendship was never more appropriate. That situation does not prevail today, a fact that has a great many implications for the prospects for dialogue as well. Western-minded Muslims who have a favorable attitude toward the Catholic Church no longer have the influence among their co-religionists that they once had, at least in the Islamic world.
That is not to say, however, that we have returned to the world of Benedict XIV and Callixtus III, when Catholics understood that Mohammedanism, as it was then popularly styled (to the indignation of Muslims themselves), was steeped in falsehood—perhaps even diabolical—and dedicated to the destruction of the Church and to the conversion or subjugation of Christians. We are separated by centuries of cultural assumptions from the world in which it was even possible to think of one’s faith as having enemies and needing to be defended. Catholics of the modern age have long assumed that such a world was gone forever, and there is some reason to believe that it is indeed.
But with Muslim persecution of Christians escalating worldwide, there is also considerable evidence that that rough old world is returning; that it may never have been as far away as it seemed.
And there are reasons for that embedded within the Qur’an and Islamic tradition.
Refrain from the Trinity
The most obvious difference between the Christian and Islamic conceptions of God is the Trinity. The Qur’an, several times, explicitly denies the Trinity, although it never actually states the Christian doctrine accurately. And so, in the Muslim holy book, Allah asks Jesus: “O Jesus son of Mary, didst thou say unto men, ‘Take me and my mother as gods, apart from God’?” (5:116).
The Qur’an has Jesus disclaim any responsibility for Christians’ worshipping him and his mother: “He said, ‘To Thee be glory! It is not mine to say what I have no right to. If I indeed said it, Thou knowest it, knowing what is within my soul, and I know not what is within Thy soul; Thou knowest the things unseen” (5:116).
Here we have not only a merely human Jesus but also a misapprehension of the Trinity. The Qur’an envisions the Christian Trinity not as the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—three Persons, one God—but as a trio of deities: Allah, Jesus, and Mary. Nonetheless, in another passage, the Qur’an warns Christians not to affirm a single Triune God either: “People of the Book, go not beyond the bounds in your religion, and say not as to God but the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only the Messenger of God, and His Word that He committed to Mary, and a Spirit from Him. So believe in God and His Messengers, and say not, ‘Three.’ Refrain; better is it for you. God is only One God. Glory be to Him—That He should have a son! To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and in the earth; God suffices for a guardian” (4:171).
“Refrain; better is it for you.” This may simply be a warning that hellfire awaits those who take Jesus and Mary as gods besides God, in line with another passage of the Qur’an: “They are unbelievers who say, ‘God is the Third of Three.’ No god is there but One God. If they refrain not from what they say, there shall afflict those of them that disbelieve a painful chastisement” (5:73). However, given the Qur’an’s exhortation to Muslims to fight Christians “until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled” (9:29), this warning also carries a hint of menace.
Allah is not a Father
The Allah of the Qur’an, in the first place, is not a father. He is, above all, not the father of Jesus Christ. As we will see in more detail in the next chapter, the Qur’an decisively and repeatedly rejects, as an insult to Allah’s transcendent majesty, the idea that Jesus is his son; indeed, that he could have any son at all.
The assumption behind verse 4:171 quoted above is that it would somehow limit God if he had a son. In contradiction of this unthinkable proposition, Allah says of himself: “To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and in the earth; God suffices for a guardian.” The idea here is that Allah would only have a son if he were too weak or insufficient to manage the universe himself, and so needed a partner to share the work; but he is all-powerful, and doesn’t need any help to govern the heavens and the earth, and thus has no son.
The Qur’an dismisses the idea of divine fatherhood, which Muslims assume must occur in physical terms. “It is not for God to take a son unto Him. Glory be to Him! When He decrees a thing, He but says to it ‘Be,’ and it is” (19:35). In other words, Allah has no son because he can create by fiat and so need not beget. What’s more, Allah must not have a son because he doesn’t have a wife: “The Creator of the heavens and the earth—how should He have a son, seeing that He has no consort, and He created all things, and He has knowledge of everything?” (6:101). “He—exalted be our Lord’s majesty! has not taken to Himself either consort or a son” (72:3). In line with this, the warnings to Christians to “say not, ‘Three,’” and not to worship Jesus and Mary as gods alongside Allah seem to stem from an assumption that Christians believed that God had taken Mary as his wife and begotten a son, Jesus, after the manner of the old pagan gods.
Catholics would reject this as a gross misunderstanding of what the Trinity and the Fatherhood of God mean, but it generally makes little headway to explain these misunderstandings to pious and knowledgeable Muslims. Hearing that the Trinity is composed of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—one God, rather than a divine trio of God, Jesus, and Mary—Muslims generally point out that the Qur’anic passage doesn’t mention the Trinity anyway and so cannot be assumed to be referring to it. They also usually go on to point out that Christians nevertheless still worship Jesus as God and maintain that this is still deification of a human being and tantamount to polytheism. They also point, in a manner reminiscent of Fundamentalist Protestants, to the Church’s veneration of Mary as evidence that she, too, is worshipped as divine.
Jesus is not God’s Son, and neither are you
Islam also rejects the idea of divine fatherhood in general. In the Islamic view, in no sense can human beings be called the children of Allah. The Qur’an dismisses such an idea contemptuously, in an explicit rejection of the Jewish and Christian view. Allah first recounts the claim of the Jews and Christians, and then instructs Muhammad (and the Muslims) how to respond to it: “Say the Jews and Christians, ‘We are the sons of God, and His beloved ones.’ Say: ‘Why then does He chastise you for your sins? No; you are mortals, of His creating; He forgives whom He will, and He chastises whom He will.’ For to God belongs the kingdom of the heavens and of the earth, and all that is between them; to Him is the homecoming” (5:18).
The Qur’an’s assumption that a father would not punish his children for their wrongdoing is odd, but there it is. Whatever the reasoning, in Islam God is not a father to human beings. To a pious Muslim, a prayer like the Our Father is utterly alien. He would consider it presum
ptuous in the extreme to call Allah his Father. Instead, Allah is the master of the universe and human beings are his slaves. The hallmark of Islamic religious observance is external obedience, not likeness with the divine through an interior transformation.
This I once discovered to my considerable surprise when, early in my college career, I was showing off my knowledge of Arabic and recited the shahadah, the Islamic profession of faith, in Arabic to a Muslim: “There is no god but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet.”
The Muslim, hearing this, told me: “Now you are a Muslim!”
I was puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“You said the shahadah, you said it in Arabic, and you said it in the presence of a male Muslim witness. That means you are now a Muslim.”
“But I didn’t mean it!” I protested, growing more incredulous by the second.
“It doesn’t matter,” replied the Muslim with the utmost certainty. “You said it in the proper way. You had a witness. That is all that is needed. One’s inner dispositions are irrelevant.”
Allah’s automatons
Not only are they irrelevant, they are apparently programmed from on high.
“God changes not what is in a people, until they change what is in themselves.” So says the Qur’an (13:11), and all through the book there are so many exhortations to believe in its message that it is hard to imagine that Islam could reject the concept of free will. A medieval commentary on the Qur’an that is still widely read and respected among Muslims today, the Tafsir al-Jalalayn, says of the unbelievers that Allah does not remove “blessings from them” until they “exchange their good state for disobedience.”62 In other words, as long as they persist in sin, they have only themselves to blame.
Certainly there are contemporary Muslims who assert that Islam upholds the idea that man is free to choose or reject the path of Allah, although whether they do this intending to dissent from mainstream Islamic tradition and teaching on this matter, or simply to make Islam more palatable to non-Muslim Westerners, is unclear. The contemporary Canadian Muslim writer Abdul Rashid criticized the concept of original sin by invoking human freedom: “First, God Almighty revealed, through His chosen prophets, the right path but left it to human beings to follow it or to reject it. Secondly, it is a fundamental belief for Muslims that there is a life in the Hereafter where each human being will be accountable for his/her deeds in this world. Hereditary sin is contrary to both of these concepts—free will and accountability.”63
Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam Page 5