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

by Robert Spencer

(Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: And meanwhile they’re holding the Kalashnikovs on him! And they would go and pray and “Allahu Akbar,” and they were going to slit his throat. It’s a very straight journalistic account of what happened, but then at the end it gets very interesting because [Glass] starts having visions of the Virgin Mary who tells him how to escape from his captivity, and he does follow her directions and escapes.

  Professor Kreeft: I have been told by numerous missionaries, most of them Protestants, that something is happening in the Islamic world in the last few decades that has never happened before: Conversions to Christianity are happening and almost every single one of them has to do with a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  Mr. Spencer: Yes. Yes. There are visions of Mary that have appeared and been seen by really many thousands of people; it’s a phenomenon.

  Professor Kreeft: Zeitoun! More people saw that miracle than saw any other miracle in the entire history of the world.

  Mr. Spencer: Yes.

  Professor Kreeft: Two million.

  Mr. Spencer: In Cairo, standing on top of a church.

  Professor Kreeft: Muslims and Christians together saw the Blessed Virgin Mary.

  Mr. Spencer: So, yes, something is happening.

  Professor Kreeft: And she, unlike you, was making peace signs.

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: Oh, I’m all for peace! But I think that peace without a realistic appraisal of the situation is just naïve, and could be suicidally naïve.

  Professor Kreeft: I agree, I totally agree.

  (Applause)

  Professor Kreeft: The only thing you’ve said tonight, other than your conclusions that I disagree with, I think it was just a slip of the tongue, was you spoke of absolute good and absolute evil. Now, God is certainly absolutely good, but even the devil is not absolutely evil, because God created him. So how could Islam be worse than the devil?

  Mr. Spencer: I don’t want to speak about the devil, he doesn’t interest me. But chapter ninety-one, verse seven of the Qur’an says that God “places evil within the heart of man,” which is markedly different from the Christian idea that evil is the absence of God’s presence in the soul, and evil is a rejection of God, not something that God actively encourages.

  Professor Kreeft: But the Bible also says, “I create good and evil,” evil there being death and suffering, not moral evil.

  Mr. Spencer: That’s a different kind.

  Professor Kreeft: Maybe the Qur’an means that.

  Mr. Spencer: Well we could trade verses all night —

  Professor Zmirak: Wait, are you referring to the question of free will in Islam?

  Mr. Spencer: Yeah, that’s just where I was going to go. In chapter thirty-two, verse thirteen of the Qur’an, Allah says “We” (he always speaks in the royal “we” even though he’s an absolute unity). He says, “If We had willed, We could have guided all men to the truth. But instead We will fill Hell with djinns (genies) and men.” So this is the god of Islam speaking, saying, “I could have brought everyone to a knowledge of the truth, but I just want to fill up Hell.”

  Professor Kreeft: But, like Augustine, most Muslims also claim to believe in free will as well as infallible predestination.

  Mr. Spencer: I don’t know where you’re finding them, because actually the Qur’an decisively rejects the idea of free will. It says repeatedly that Allah “leads astray those who he wills,” does not “allow to go astray” but he “leads astray those whom he wills and guides those whom he wills.” And this verse I just quoted to you is also echoed in chapter seven, verse one-seventy-nine, which also says, “I will fill Hell with men.” He could have decided to do otherwise, but he has decided to condemn people to a very luridly, lovingly, lavishly described vision of Hell in the Qur’an, and he’s sending them there because he wants to.

  Professor Zmirak: Perhaps, Dr. Kreeft, I can ask you this, as a former Calvinist. In the Regensburg Address, Pope Benedict was talking about commonalities between Islam and Calvinism in their rejection of the idea that we can reason about God, because analogy does not apply to God. If we cannot reason about God, there can be no theology. Pope Benedict was talking about this as the beginning of the secularization of the Western mind. It seems to me that when the Muslims rejected the Mu‘tazilite option, when they rejected philosophy, they rejected Avicenna, they rejected Averroes, at the same time Thomas Aquinas was taking these thinkers and trying to reconcile faith and reason. The Muslims saw an irreparable divide, an insuperable divide, and they chose faith as opposed to reason. Pope Benedict seemed to be saying that with Calvinism and with the Reformation, the long process began of the West rejecting faith and only accepting reason. So is there some sense in which Islam and the secular West are kind of mirror images of each other? Two broken pieces of a puzzle?

  Professor Kreeft: Yes! That’s very profound.

  Professor Zmirak: Thank you.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: Well, he didn’t make it up, the pope made it up.

  Professor Zmirak: I’m proud of myself for remembering it.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Kreeft: Robert Reilly’s recent book, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, is very enlightening on that. It is a desperate philosophical mistake. It’s nominalism.

  Mr. Spencer: Yes.

  Professor Zmirak: All right, are there questions from the audience?

  Questioner No. 1: I’m seeing a parallel with the Sufis and their piety—which you were lauding them for—and the Pharisees and their piety, which was really dirty rags because the inside was corrupt. So that’s what I put to you is the Sufis’ piety.

  Professor Kreeft: Even the Gospel writers didn’t say that the only good Pharisee is a bad Pharisee. In fact, there were good Pharisees: Nicodemus was one of them, Joseph of Arimathea was one of them, Gamaliel was one of them, and he was St. Paul’s teacher. Here you have very good Pharisees, although many of the Pharisees were wicked people.

  Questioner No. 2: This is one for Mr. Spencer. Since politics is a practical art that brings together strange bedfellows, factions, and coalitions of people and persons that normally would be opposed to each other, from a purely practical standpoint, couldn’t we say that the Christian West and Islam, individuals or political groups or nations, we can make a deal with the devil so to speak and cooperate with them in the United Nations on the global front to fight the kind of evils that Dr. Kreeft was talking about?

  Mr. Spencer: Well, I don’t have any objection to doing that. Obviously, it worked in Beijing, and I think the only hazard of it is that people don’t recognize the limitations of it. Here again, I’m all for peace, but we need to go into such things with open eyes and understand that we’re dealing with a group that will never regard non-Muslims as their equals and will not regard us as any more their friends because we have cooperated on these various ventures than they would if we had not cooperated. I think, for example, the American military’s idea of going and handing out candy on the streets of Baghdad and Kabul and basketballs and going in and building hospitals and schools and roads and all that, it’s all great, but it’s predicated on the idea that we will win over their hearts and minds by doing that—as if, for example, they hate us because we aren’t being nice to them. Or they hate us because of our immorality, or they hate us for whatever other reason, when actually if you go back to the Qur’an it says, “Fight against the Jews and Christians,” not just the “immoral Jews and Christians” or “the Jews and Christians whose foreign policy you dislike” or something like that. Just, “Fight against the Jews and Christians.” So for a Muslim who takes that seriously, ultimately no accord is possible unless we submit or convert.

  Questioner No. 3: We often find here in the media when there’s an event such as the Christmas Day Bomber or Fort Hood, that the Muslim has been radicalized—either one or both. What is it that radicalized them?

  Professor Kreeft: Well, I know how Bob’s going to answer that question: �
�They haven’t been radicalized because Islam is essentially radical. They haven’t been turned into radicals from being moderate Muslims, rather moderate Muslims probably began by being more radical Muslims and then softened their religion.” And that’s probably historically true. But we certainly can hope for a softening of Muslims as has happened before in history; it can happen again, because Islam is like Protestantism. It has a Bible, but there are so many different interpretations of it possible without an infallible magisterium that there are no preset limits on emphases or interpretations that could be in the future. I don’t personally hold much hope for a moderate and liberal Islam suddenly arising in our lifetime, but it’s not intrinsically impossible, so I think we should encourage any movement in that direction.

  Mr. Spencer: What radicalizes Muslims? It’s generally an appeal to Qur’anic texts and teachings; it’s generally a call, saying, “You are not being a good Muslim unless you do this.” Chapter nine, verse 111 of the Qur’an guarantees Paradise to those who “kill and are killed for Allah.” And this is used today by suicide bombing recruiters to get people to strap bombs on themselves. They go kill some infidels, they get killed in the process, they’re guaranteed a place in Paradise. And that’s a very powerful inducement if you really believe that this is how things work. Now, what would soften these things—I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, but Islam, we should know in the first place, is not really like Protestantism at all. Protestantism, as far as I understand it, operates on the principle of, “The Bible alone is the authority,” and so anybody can read it and come to a different view, because no book interprets itself. But in Islam, there are authorities. There are the ulama of various countries, the religious scholars who issue fatawa, which are considered binding upon those within the jurisdiction. There are the schools of jurisprudence, the madhhahib. There are nine of those. Incidentally, eight of those nine do admit to utility of artificial contraception, and so that’s something that they differ [on] from the teaching of the Catholic Church. The teaching authority of those schools of jurisprudence is considered to be binding upon the Muslims who adhere to one or the other of the schools, although it’s not a matter of conversion or some kind of rupture if one moves from one to the other. They’re regionally distributed, and generally, if you grow up in one area then you interpret the Qur’an according to the teachings of these various schools. As I said before, there is no sect or school that doesn’t teach the necessity to wage war on unbelievers and subjugate them. Could there arise some kind of Islam in the future that didn’t teach that or actively rejected it? I suppose anything is possible, but it would have to come with a wholesale rejection of Qur’anic literalism, and they would have to be considered by traditional and mainstream Muslims to be bad Muslims.

  Professor Zmirak: They would have to be like Jesuits at Boston College?

  Professor Kreeft: Exactly!

  (Laughter)

  Professor Zmirak: Maybe the Jesuits can help soften up the Muslims.

  Questioner No. 4: Isn’t the real problem with the fact that Europe doesn’t have enough young men—they can’t replace themselves—and the fact that Europe will be Muslim in thirty years and Germany will be totally Muslim in fifty years, is that the real problem? It seems to me that with what Peter Kreeft said, “I bring the student here and he understands, he’s respectful,” then I think about what happened two days ago or three days ago in Iraq.

  Professor Zmirak: The slaughter in the Catholic Church in Baghdad?

  Questioner No. 4: With Peter Kreeft, isn’t it possible he could be back—he might even have been in the church two days ago! They’re schizophrenic. Here in the United States they’re perfectly—it’s part of the faith that says when you’re outnumbered to be a pacifist. When they’re amongst themselves, when they’re in a group, they seem to lose control. So how do we handle that? What is our philosophy? How do we address that practical problem?

  Mr. Spencer: I would like to amplify just a bit a couple of these points, because Dr. Kreeft said earlier that most Muslims don’t practice polygamy, don’t practice these other elements of the faith that we would consider to be noxious and I think are objectively so. Actually, that’s not entirely true. Actually, even by most recent accounts—I believe, was it 20,000 or 30,000 polygamous families in the United States that are Muslim. It was very noteworthy, that Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American-Islamic Relations—which is a Hamas-linked Muslim Brotherhood front group that masquerades as a moderate organization—actually said in response to that news item: “Yes, there is polygamy among Muslims in the United States, and Islamic scholars differ as to whether it’s permissible.” Notice, he didn’t say anything about American law making it illegal. He didn’t seem to care about that at all, it was only “Islamic scholars.” And also, just today in San Diego, there was an Islamic cleric, a preacher of nonviolence and tolerance well regarded in his community named Mohamed MohamedMohamud, I’m not making that up.

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: And Mohamed MohamedMohamud was arrested today for aiding the jihad in Somalia. And so what are we to do about this? The first thing we would have to do is assess it realistically and understand that, really, anybody who professes the Islamic faith, if he delves into the teachings of his own religion, is somebody who could end up being very dangerous to us. Now, that doesn’t mean that people should be rounded up and put into camps or any of this nonsense, but we need to enforce our own laws about sedition and to formulate some sane immigration policies and recognize this as an ideological conflict and not some sort of a problem with “racism” or all these things that usually cloud these issues.

  Professor Kreeft: May I ask you a question?

  Mr. Spencer: Certainly.

  Professor Kreeft: Which do you think is worse in the Eyes of God: Muslim polygamy or the fruit of the Enlightenment by which we say that a man can marry a man?

  Mr. Spencer: You know, it’s very interesting that in Dr. Kreeft’s book, he has a chapter about marriage and writes very movingly, as he can do so well, about the nature of marriage. And he has the Muslim expatiating upon the nature of marriage and the respect that a husband should have for his wife and the respect that a wife should have for her husband and so on. The interesting thing to note, however, is that is not the concept of Islamic marriage at all. In Islamic marriage, the woman is essentially chattel, and actually the word for marriage in Islam is an obscenity in Arabic. I’m not making this up, but the theological term for marriage in Islam is a word that people don’t say in polite company. And it’s because it’s really a degraded idea. And so when you ask me “Which one is worse?” I think that both are deviations from the kind of mutual respect and mutual self-giving that the Catholic Church envisions as a marriage.

  Professor Kreeft: But doesn’t the Qur’an also say that you can have four wives, but only if you can respect all of them and do justice to all of them?

  Mr. Spencer: It doesn’t say respect all of them, it says you can have four wives—I happen to have it right here—it says you can have four wives if you can treat them all equally. In other words, if you treat them all the same, if you’re beastly to all of them—

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: —then you can have them. It doesn’t say anything about respect.

  Questioner No. 5: First of all, I’d like to say that it’s nice to be at a college where we can have a debate on Islam where the faculty and students are not outside shouting obscenities.

  (Applause)

  Mr. Spencer: I was at Temple University in Philadelphia just last month and there were protestors outside shouting about racism and how I was such a terrible person and we could barely hear ourselves in there.

  Questioner No. 5: So what I would like to address is this growing allegiance between right-wing Islam and not only the American Left but the global Left on an ideological level. And a recent example is when Bill O’Reilly went on The View, a left-of-center show, and he mentioned that we were attacked by Muslims
on 9/11, Joy Behar got up and walked out. And right after that, Juan Williams was fired from NPR for saying he gets nervous when he sees Muslims getting on an airplane. So I’m sure it’s something most of us innately feel, and so I’m trying to figure out if you guys have any thoughts on this growing—because I feel browbeaten any time I want to speak about Islam in public, and sometimes I feel like my life might be in danger because of it. So why the alliance?

  Professor Zmirak: Well, I’d like to point out that Al-Qaeda has issued a fatwa against Mr. Spencer, and he’s number four on their list of targeted Americans. That’s why he has a bodyguard here tonight. I would like both of you to be able to respond to that: Why would the Left feel an affinity with Islam? It seems bizarre to us. Do you have any insight, Professor Kreeft?

  Professor Kreeft: Yeah: because the Left wants to feel an affinity with everybody.

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: Except us.

  Professor Kreeft: Absolutely right, except us.

  (Laughter)

  Mr. Spencer: The Left hates America, and because the Left hates America and because they see the Islamic jihadists hate America, they see a friend there. They see someone they can cooperate with. And also the Left doesn’t understand religion, doesn’t take religion seriously and thinks, “Well, yes, they’re nutty religious people, but we can control that. We’ll take care of that after we’ve defeated the real enemy.”

  Professor Kreeft: Dinesh D’Souza wrote a book called The Enemy at Home, one of the best books I’ve ever read—

  Mr. Spencer: One of the worst books I’ve ever read.

  (Laughter)

  Professor Zmirak: All right, you guys can duke it out now.

  Professor Kreeft: I heard Dinesh debate Alan Wolfe at Boston College, and it was the most one-sided thing I’ve ever seen, the most embarrassing debate I’ve ever heard, and Boston College since the debate refused to put the transcript out because Dinesh totally demolished Alan Wolfe, who was a classic Liberal who says, “We’re all equal, why can’t we just get along?”