Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya:
the Modern Relevance of a Medieval Debate

1. 26 January 2000: “Features of the Muslim-Christian Polemical Tradition”

2. 2 February 2000: “The Christian Prophet and the Prophet of Islam”

3. 9 February 2000: “The Divine Word and Scripture in Islam and Christianity”

4. 16 February 2000: “God’s Unity and Trinity: the Islamic-Christian Debate”

5. 23 February 2000: “Sin and Redemption in Christianity and Islam”

6. 1 March 2000: “Moving beyond the Burdens of History”
     1. FEATURES OF THE MUSLIM-CHRISTIAN POLEMICAL TRADITION
     Revisiting an old work

Almost 30 years ago, I wrote a dissertation on what is certainly the longest, at 1400 pages, Muslim critique of Christian faith. This is Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh li-Man Baddal Dîn al-Masîh [The Correct Answer to Those Who Changed the Religion of Christ], by Taqiuddin Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya. This work was written, probably in Cairo, by the great Hanbali jurist about the year 1320. As the title implies, Ibn Taymiyya wrote his treatise as a “response” or “answer” to an apologetic work written several centuries earlier by a Christian.

Ibn Taymiyya was a highly public and controversial figure for over 40 years, and as a result, the broad outlines of his life are well-known. Born to a prominent family of Hanbali jurists who took refuge first in Harran and then in Damascus after the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, Ibn Taymiyya first entered the public eye in 1293 when, as rector of the Hanbali madrasa in Damascus, he became involved in the case of a Christian accused of insulting the Prophet Muhammad. For leading a street demonstration aimed at pressuring the Governor to bring the case to court, he was arrested and jailed. This pattern was repeated many times in his life when he was imprisoned for his public criticism of political and religious figures. In 1328, he died in prison as what today would be called a “prisoner of conscience” when, according to his biographer, he was denied the use of pen and paper in his cell.

The Christian work to which Ibn Taymiyya responded in Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh was penned by a man about whom we know much less. He is called Bulus al-Rahib al-Antaki, that is, “Paul of Antioch, the Monk.” It is known that he was Melkite Bishop of Saida (Sidon) in modern Lebanon sometime between 1140-1180 when the region was under Crusader rule. In addition to his “Letter to a Muslim” to which Ibn Taymiyya responded, Paul wrote at least five other controversialist treatises against various Christian currents and against Jews.

When I wrote my dissertation on Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh in the 1970s, my interest was mainly textual. I compared the various manuscripts of Ibn Taymiyya’s work, sought to make critical corrections to the manuscript tradition, translated a portion of the work into English, and tried to locate Ibn Taymiyya’s critique of Christianity within the context of his broader theological vision. I did not seek to evaluate the arguments of Ibn Taymiyya or Paul of Antioch, to question how their debate fits into the great sweep of Muslim-Christian relations down through the centuries, or to ask whether the questions they raised have any relevance for Christians and Muslims in their relations today.

In the years since I finished my dissertation, I have not had many occasions on which to return to this medieval debate. After completing my studies, I spent my first years in Indonesia, where I taught Islamics in a Catholic theological faculty and often lectured on aspects of Christian faith in various Islamic faculties. Then I spent 13 years at the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue as Head of the Office for Islam. There I was constantly involved in Christian-Muslim relations, but only on rare occasions did our encounters touch on questions of medieval polemics. A period of three years teaching Christian theology in Islamic theological faculties in Turkey sharpened my awareness of the ways in which the issues affecting Christian-Muslim relations have changed over the past six centuries, but I also became conscious of the fact that many of the basic questions have remained the same.
I take the occasion of the Martin D’Arcy lectures to return to the debate between Ibn Taymiyya and Paul of Antioch and to renew my acquaintance with these works that I knew intimately 30 years ago but which I had not studied for many years. There is an element of adventure in returning to one’s early scholarly work. I find myself addressing new questions to the texts. I bring elements of experience, encounter, and the intervention of subsequent world events to my reading that could not have been part of my original study.

I am not merely encountering anew Ibn Taymiyya and Paul of Antioch, but I encounter myself as I was 30 years ago. I rediscover the idealism, the hopes, the “desire to do great things for God,” as we Jesuits say, and find myself measuring these early aspirations against the many years of experience of living among, working with, challenging and being challenged by Muslim believers. Finally, this project of returning to my early thesis is an opportunity to recover, at least in my mind, my relationship with my director, the late Pakistani scholar Fazlur Rahman, who will always remain one of the great formative influences on my thinking and my understanding of Islam.

     On polemics and “the polemical tradition”

The literary encounter between Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya is an outstanding example of polemics between Christians and Muslims in the medieval period, and in many ways their interchange stands out as a high point in the Muslim-Christian polemical tradition. But can one properly speak of a “polemical tradition” in Christianity and in Islam? It is not difficult to point to a certain number of works by individual Christians and Muslims which can properly be called “polemics,” that is, argumentation composed with the intent of refuting or showing the falsity of another’s position. The dictionary definition adds the adjective “aggressive” in defining polemics as an “aggressive attack on the opinions or principles of another.” The vast majority, though not all, of medieval and modern polemics by Muslims and Christians have been, in fact, quite aggressive and presume an equally inimical attitude on the part of the adversarius.

But, taken together, do these polemical works comprise an identifiable literary tradition? The existence of such a tradition implies a recognizable history of literary activity that employs, down through the centuries, a shared fund of content, presumptions, conventions, and religious tendencies which individual writers adopted from their forebearers and modified according to the demands of their historical and social context and their own reflections, insights, and preoccupations, and in doing so bequeathed to later generations their personal contributions to the tradition.

I believe that such a recognizable pattern of shared religious presumptions, literary conventions, and intellectual argumentation can be found in medieval polemical works that justify speaking of a polemical tradition. Ibn Taymiyya, writing in the early 14^th century, never met Paul of Antioch, whose writings date from the mid-12^th century, and yet they shared much in common with one another and with earlier and later polemicists, more perhaps than they shared with their contemporary co-believers or with most Muslims and Christians today.

I am referring here to “serious” polemics, that is, those that take the trouble to be well-informed of the views of the other and proceed with a serious regard for truth. Norman Daniel and others ⁽¹⁾  have well chronicled the many poorly-informed writings on Islam which circulated in Western Europe in medieval times which were often characterized by scurrilous attacks on the personality and career of Muhammad and by groundless distortions of Islamic dogma. Such gratuitous and facile attacks are only possible in situations where the opponent is not at hand to be able to respond directly. It must be admitted that the vast majority of Muslim polemics - as well as those of Arab and Byzantine Christians - are more high-minded and better informed and focus on real issues of dogma rather than on absurd and indefensible allegations.

One identifiable characteristic of works in the polemical tradition is the intellectualization of faith. Religious faith is seen as a set of logical propositions to be defended or refuted. Revelation produces a body of dogma which stands in contradiction, on certain points, to that collection of dogmas held by the adversary. The polemicist presumes that through logical argument one can demonstrate the correctness of one’s own body of dogma and the error of his opponent. ⁽²⁾ 

The polemical tradition consequently pays little attention to the non-rational elements of religious life, such as worship, moral values and ethical behavior, or mystical experience. It was generally accepted on both sides that each religio had its own set of ritual practices which generally went unchallenged unless they went against some cardinal principle or Scriptural interdiction of the other. For example, Muslims did not object to Christian liturgy except in the use of icons or statues, which are forbidden in Islam. Christian monastic life was rejected because of the usual interpretation of Qur’anic verse 57:27 that states, “they [wrongly] invented monasticism”, and a hadith to the same intent. Christian polemicists, for their part, railed against Islamic polygamy, not because it was spontaneously regarded as opposed to the moral order, but because it was condemned in evangelical dicta. But by and large, questions of worship, morality, and religious behaviour were passed over in silence in the polemical tradition.

Similarly, questions of mystical experience, which by its nature cannot be translated satisfactorily into rational categories or logical debate, rarely arose in polemics. Perhaps because they were skeptical of the adequacy of human reason to grasp or express religious experience, or perhaps because they considered controversy to be part of the superficial, transient aspect of religion rather than of its essence, the practitioners of the mystical path in the two religions rarely engaged in polemics. There are exceptions, such as the Damascene Sufi, Muhammad ibn Abi Talib, a contemporary of Ibn Taymiyya’s who also responded to Paul of Antioch.

Not only are polemics dogma-oriented, but the polemical tradition is selective in choice of topic. Very early on in the history of Muslim-Christian polemics, a certain number of controverted issues gained notoriety within the tradition which were then debated and elaborated down through the centuries. By focusing on the debatable and controversial, the polemical authors tended to bestow undue attention on those elements of dogma on which disagreement was found, that is, on frequently peripheral points of faith not shared by the two parties, with a corresponding neglect of common aspects of monotheistic faith which were often more central, such as God’s role as Creator, Guide, and Judge, or the importance that both religions place on prayer, fidelity, and good works.

Truth was assumed by each side to be not only knowable but demonstrable. The declared goal was to convince the other of the error of his ways. It was hoped that the vanquished opponent would admit error and convert to the true path. At the conclusion of the polemic, the opponent no longer had any logical defence. The adversary who did not admit error and convert was assumed to be in bad faith, refusing to accept demonstrated truth because of unworthy motives of social position, family connections, stubbornness, or complacency. The polemical author left no room for conscientious doubt, sincere objection, the free action of God’s grace, or the ambiguity or inadequacy of the author’s own argumentation.

One can doubt the practical efficacy of the whole polemical enterprise. It would seem that the number of Christians or Muslims who through the study of polemics came to the conclusion that they were in error and must conscientiously change religion was negligible. One suspects that the intended audience for such works was usually, consciously or not, the writer’s own co-religionists who found in them a reassuring confirmation of what they already believed.

The 17^th century work of the Christian Spanish scholar Tirso Gonzales, who later became Superior General of the Jesuits, was one of the last pre-modern Christian polemics against Islam, before the advent of European colonial incursions into the Muslim world and the Kantian critique of reason drastically changed Muslim-Christian discourse and put an end to the classical polemical tradition. He concluded his work with these poignant words to his Muslim interlocutor:
Friend Hâmid, before God you will not be able to plead ignorance. I have manifested the truth to you. If you still doubt the truth of what I have said, ask God to show you the truth, so that He may illuminate the darkness of your mind and lead you to salvation...So that you be worthy of His light, avoid vices, practice piety, love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself...for to these things all men are obliged...Then, after many signs of love and a friendly embrace, the Moor went away. Although I have not explored the matter further, I still carry the greatest hope that he will die a Christian. ⁽³⁾ 

These words are intriguing in what they reveal. Firstly, Hâmid seems to have been a real person rather than a literary fiction. The common practice in polemics of creating a foil who would ask all the right questions in the right order and raise the proper refutable objections, a device which, we will see, was already used by Paul of Antioch in the 12^th century, should have resulted in a fictional Hâmid’s accepting Gonzales’ argumentation and converting to Christianity. That this did not happen is somewhat surprising within the tradition and an indication that the encounter on which the book is based is genuine.

Secondly, it can be seen from these concluding words that a genuine affection and sense of fellow-feeling seems to have grown up between Gonzales and his “Friend Hâmid.” Gonzales’ disappointment that Hâmid did not accept his argumentation is grounded in the conviction that this person, about whom Gonzales truly cares and whom he was hoping to “save” by his arguments, is rejecting truth and the offer of salvation.

Finally, Gonzales, admitting that the Muslim was not won over by his presentation, and still hoping for his eventual conversion, recognized nevertheless that there was still much that his friend could do to obtain God’s favor. In recommending to the Muslim that he “be worthy of [God’s] light, avoid vices, practice piety, love God above all things and his neighbor as himself, for to these things all persons are obliged,” Gonzales is uncharacteristically moving out of the polemical tradition into one of fellow-feeling, emphasizing common elements and responsibilities of Christians and Muslims. ⁽⁴⁾ 

Despite these concluding remarks, atypical of the work as a whole, the basic problem with Gonzales’ book, and the main reason that today we do not find it and similar polemics convincing is the assumption which he shared with earlier polemicists that rational arguments can lead to certainty. The medieval Christian and Muslim polemicist are united in presuming that one who has been confronted with a logical presentation of the true faith must in honesty accept the overwhelming evidence of its correctness. Neither Muslim nor Christian was inclined to accept the limits of rational argumentation, to take into account the mysteries of human response and refusal, or ultimately to refer questions of human salvation to divine wisdom. The modest recognition of how little we humans know about divine matters expressed in the Arabic phrase wa-Allahu a’lam, “but God is more knowing,” which concludes so many Islamic theological discussions, is not invoked, by either side, in Christian-Muslim polemics.

     Non-polemical Muslim writings on Christianity

When Ibn Taymiyya wrote Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh, there already existed a broad range of Muslim writing on Christianity upon which he could draw. At the outset, it might be worth surveying the literary resources available to Ibn Taymiyya, a task facilitated by his habit, relatively rare among authors in Arabic of his period, of citing his sources by name. Not all these writings are polemical. Some have no polemical intent or content whatever.

The 9^th century Muslim historian, Al-Ya’qûbi ⁽⁵⁾ , attempts, within the framework of his universal history, an objective account of the life and death of Jesus and the beginnings of the Christian church. For this, he uses the Four Gospels as his primary historical sources, which he supplements with Qur’anic passages and non-Scriptural information. He notes the unique elements in each Gospel, points out discrepancies and contradictions in the various accounts, and attempts to determine historical probability in the conflicting evangelical accounts. Similarly, in an antecedent to modern phenomenological approaches to the study of religions, Al-Birûni ⁽⁶⁾  devoted much attention to Christian rites, feasts, calendars, fasting, history, and dogma. He is interested purely in describing what he has discovered of Christian belief and life, without any pretensions at evaluating or passing judgment on what he depicts.

A similarly descriptive approach to Christianity is found in the milal wal-nihal literature. Based on the prophetic hadîth that states, “Among the Jews there are 71 sects and among the Christians 72; but my community will contain 73 sects, ” Muslim scholars undertook to delineate and analyze the differences between the Muslim sects and also treated the theological differences among Christians. Within this literature, there is wide variation in approach. Ibn Hazm’s Al-Fisal fil-Milal wal-Ahwâ’ wal-Nihal ⁽⁷⁾  was written from the conviction that truth was one, knowable, and found exclusively in the tenets and practices of Sunni Islam. By elucidating the beliefs of other sects and by refuting their errors, he intended to make evident the uniqueness of the true faith. Thus, although expository in form, Ibn Hazm’s Al-Fisal was polemical in intent.

Other milal wal-nihal authors, such as Al-Baghdadi, Al-Shahrastâni, and Fakhr al-Din al-Râzi ⁽⁸⁾  basically attempted an objective classification of Islamic and non-Islamic beliefs. In this medieval precursor of the study of comparative religion, the authors of the “books of sects” were more interested in outlining variations in formulation of intellectualized dogma than in varieties of practice, ritual, or hierarchical structure.

Some, like Al-Shahrastâni and Al-Râzi, clearly undertook research beforehand by interviewing Christian scholars about their beliefs and theological differences. Al-Shahrastâni, for example, was more sympathetic to Nestorian theology than to what he called “Melkite” (that is, Byzantine) or “Jacobite” (non-Chalcedonian) theologies, not only because the Nestorian “low Christology” was closer to Islamic belief about the person of Christ, but also because his main interlocutors were Nestorians of Baghdad, who “indoctrinated” him, so to speak, with a defence of their own views along with refutations of the other theological currents. ⁽⁹⁾  Thus, al-Shahrastâni finds in Nestorian views on the divine attributes a close parallel with Mu’tazili positions, particularly that of Abu Hâshim’s modalism ⁽¹⁰⁾ , while he regards Monophysite theology as leading logically to a dualism of two gods - Father and Son.

The intellectual world in which the Muslim authors wrote was that of the Eastern Mediterranean and Mesopotamia. As such, their classification of Christian “sects” always centered on the three competing theological systems of Byzantine or Melkite thought, Nestorian, and what they called “Jacobite” or non-Chalcedonian Monophysite theology. About Western European Christianity they were less well-informed. Even Ibn Hazm, writing in Al-Andalus, Islamic Spain, appears to have relied mainly on Eastern sources, Christian and Muslim, for his presentation of Christian theology. ⁽¹¹⁾ 

The Muslim scholars of the milal wal-nihal literature could also draw upon Christian writings in the same genre. Paul of Antioch, who wrote the Christian apology to which Ibn Taymiyya responded, and about whom I will have occasion to refer often, himself wrote a “Book of Sects,” in which, like Ibn Hazm, he not only described Christian theological currents but refuted those with which he disagreed. ⁽¹²⁾  It is interesting to note that to the three aforementioned currents, Paul of Antioch adds a fourth, that of the Maronites, an indication that his treatise antedates the union of the Maronites with Rome in 1180.

The milal wal-nihal literature, which was usually not explicitly polemical, nevertheless had great influence on the Muslim polemics. The polarization and often artificial exaggeration of differences between various Christian views which the Christian interlocutors themselves presented is reflected in the Islamic exposition of sects on which, in turn, the Muslim polemicists heavily depended.

Among Muslim writings on Christianity, one must note also syncretistic approaches. The most notable example of such approaches is that of the Persian scholar Iranshahri ⁽¹³⁾ , whose writings on Hindu, Manichaean, Christian, and Jewish religions are praised by Al-Birûni as “unsurpassed for their impartiality and carefulness.” Unlike Al-Birûni, Iranshahri was not a dispassionate recorder but showed a fascination with all religions. His personal belief was highly eclectic and not limited to his own Islamic tradition. Although Iranshahri’s works on religions are lost and our information about his writings comes only from passages cited by later authors like Al-Birûni and Nasîr-i-Khusraw, it is clear that his studies of Christianity represent a specific instance of non-polemical writing.

The syncretistic approach followed by Iranshahri can be seen more clearly in the extant treatises of the Brethren of Purity (al-Ikhwân al-Safâ’). These writers were unconcerned about doctrinal issues which separated orthodox Islam from orthodox Christianity, but saw Jesus and his disciples as universal religious figures whose lives and teaching were the common property of all seekers of truth. In the treatises of the Ikhwân al-Safâ’, presentations of the life and teaching of Jesus, including his rejection, crucifixion and burial, are taken from the Gospels and, by extensive use of esoteric (bâtini) interpretation, elucidate the often highly unorthodox beliefs of the Brethren. Jesus’ prophetic mission is interpreted as stemming from his compassion for those enslaved by passion and sunk in ignorance and the externalities of legal religion, and his resurrection illustrates for them the continuation of the life of the soul after the death of the body. ⁽¹⁴⁾  Thus, they are concerned with the person and mission of Jesus as exemplary of the universal teachings of the perennial philosophy which transcend any particular tradition but are manifested in all those who have attained eternal wisdom.

A final genre of non-polemical literature to be mentioned is what is called masîhiyyât. These were edifying tales on moral and devotional themes about Christian monks and saints whose provenance is popular Christian preaching and storytelling. The Palestinian martyr St. George, “Jirjis” was especially popular and even finds a place in Muslim collections of qisas al-anbiyâ’, the “lives of the prophets.” While not so numerous or important as the isra’iliyyât, a parallel literature recounting stories from rabbinic writings, the masîhiyyât were prevalent in Muslim circles with an ascetical or mystical bent. Salâh al-Dîn al-Munajjid, editor of many of these masîhiyyât, affirms:
“The narrations and sayings originating with the monks are particularly of interest in that they strangely resemble that which we find reported in reference to the Muslim ascetics and saints in works of Sufism such as the Hilyat al-Awliyâ’ of Abu Nu’aym. This particularly applies in the case of those things which concern detachment, renunciation of the things of this world, and the destruction of self - attitudes which in Islam correspond to the monastic life in Christianity.” ⁽¹⁵⁾ 

     Lines of argument in Muslim polemics about Christianity

More to the point for our interests are the polemical works of Muslims about Christianity, since Ibn Taymiyya drew upon the earlier polemical arguments as the point of departure for his own original argumentation. The earliest Muslim polemics stem from the late Umayyad period, but it was in Abbasid Baghdad that the main lines of the debates between Christians and Muslims were developed. One can distinguish six main currents of polemical approach to Christianity by Muslims.

1. Biblical prophecies of Muhammad. The main justification offered by Christians for their refusal to follow Islam was that there is nothing in the Bible which would lead them to accept Muhammad as a prophet, or Islam as a religion to which they were called. In response, the Muslim writers undertook an extensive study of the Bible in which they sought to find prophecies which foretold the coming of Muhammad. Since many of the prophecies from the Hebrew Bible - in Deuteronomy, the Psalms, Isaiah and the other prophets - were the same as those used by Christians to predict the coming of Jesus as the Messiah, these did not form compelling arguments against the Christians.

However, ‘Ali al-Tabari, a Christian convert to Islam, opened a new area for debate between Christians and Muslims by calling attention to the passages of John’s Gospel in which Jesus foretold the coming of the Paraclete. ⁽¹⁶⁾  Interpreted by Christians to refer to the sending of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, Al-Tabari and later Muslim scholars interpreted these passages as predictions of the sending of Muhammad as final prophet. Collections of Biblical prophecies became a common ingredient of later Muslim polemical works, especially the influential work of Shihâb al-Dîn al-Qarafi, Al-Ajwiba al-Fakhira ‘an al-As’ila al-Fâjira [Efficacious Answers to Arrogant Questions] ⁽¹⁷⁾ , which systematically interpreted the Bible in light of the details of the life and mission of Muhammad.

By the time of Ibn Taymiyya in the early 14^th century, a well-developed body of literature existed of passages collected from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament which were meant to show that when correctly interpreted, predicted the future prophetic mission of Muhammad. The importance of Biblical research among Muslims was well noted by Fakhr al-Dîn al-Râzi:
“These verses demonstrate that the description of the messenger and the reality of his mission are written in the Torah and the Gospel. For if that had not been written, then the mention of these words in the Qur’ân would be for Jews and Christians the best reason to turn away from them.” ⁽¹⁸⁾ 

2. Biblical argumentation against Christian beliefs. Muslim writers had a second reason to study the Bible. To the extent that the Biblical writings were textually sound, they must be considered by Muslims to be divine messages revealed by God and delivered through the mediation of a true prophet. As such, they must teach the primordial and perennial dîn, the one religion brought by all the prophets and should form conclusive proof against innovated Christian beliefs such as the Trinity and the divine and human natures in Christ. On this basis, Muslim scholars like the Zaydi Al-Qâsim ibn Ibrahîm and the Ash’arite scholars Al-Ghazâli and Al-Baqillâni ⁽¹⁹⁾  offered a comprehensive Islamic tafsîr or commentary and interpretation of the Christian Gospels.

3. Al-Tahrîf . The accusation of textual corruption. Some Muslim writers considered a third possibility. It was conceivable, they held, that Muhammad originally had been clearly mentioned in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but those original revealed Scriptures are not identical with the texts held sacred by the People of the Book, either at the time of Muhammad’s mission or at the later period in which the Muslim author was writing. What had occurred in the interval between the death of Jesus and the time of Muhammad was that the Sacred Books had undergone corruption (in Arabic, tahrîf). In other words, the inerrant books delivered by the prophets Moses and Jesus had subsequently undergone change, either inadvertently or through conscious distortion and corruption.

It is worth noting that the charge of tahrîf was rarely brought, except in a carefully nuanced form, by the same polemicists as those who compiled collections of Biblical prophecies of Muhammad, for the two types of Biblical study by Muslims were at cross-purposes. Unless the text of the Sacred Books of Jews and Christians were deemed substantially correct, it would be worthless for producing authentic prophecies and arguments indicating the future prophetic mission of Muhammad. 4. Rationalist polemic. Other Muslim scholars used as the starting point of their refutations of Christianity, not the Bible, but human reason and sought to prove that Christian beliefs were either self-contradictory, logically inconsistent, or based on unfounded hypotheses. They sought to unravel and display the contradictory elements in Christian theological formulations or to reduce them to absurdity. The Mu’tazila particularly excelled in this kind of polemic. Their exponents like Abu al-Qâsim al-Balkhi, Al-Jâhiz, and the magisterial ‘Abd al-Jabbâr ⁽²⁰⁾  posed conundrums arising from Christian trinitarian formulations which resulted in requiring multiplicity, change, or materiality in God. In response to these rational polemics, Christian apologists would replace previous formulae with new terms, which would then in turn be criticized by the Muslim scholars. This polemical debate produced a salutary by-product in that through the interaction of formulation, rebuttal, and reformulation the philosophical and theological vocabulary of both Christian and Muslim Arabs expanded and evolved toward greater precision.

As Arab Christian theologians, after Yahya ibn ‘Adi, began to employ the term sifah (aspect, attribute, characteristic) to translate the Greek hypostasis, Muslim rationalist polemics began to diverge. The Mu’tazila, who rejected the hypostatic character of the divine attributes, accused the Ash’arites and Christians of differing in expression but holding basically the same view about the nature of God’s attributes. Ash’arite scholars like Al-Baqillâni were on conceptually weaker ground, claiming that the Christian reduction of the divine sifât to three was arbitrary and illogical.

5. History of Christianity. A fifth stream of polemic concerned the history of Christianity. In their critique of Christianity, Muslim polemicists faced an anomaly that demanded an explanation. The Christian opponents claimed that their faith was founded on what they had received from Christ. Jesus, however, was confirmed in the Qur’ân as a prophet and thus infallible in whatever he brought from God. Moreover, his earliest followers, the hawariyyûn, receive Qur’anic approbation as mu’minûn (believers) and muslimûn (those who have surrendered to God). What is the relationship between Christ and his faithful disciples to the Nasâra of the Qur’ân who rejected Muhammad? When, how, and by whom was the religion brought by Jesus replaced by the man-made substitute called Christianity?

The Muslim polemicists answered this by concentrating on two figures. The first was Paul who adapted the Semitic religion brought by Jesus to the tastes of the Romans. Aspects of prophetic religion that were distasteful to the Romans, such as circumcision and purification before prayer, he eliminated. He sought to curry favor with the Roman matrons by banning divorce and establishing monogamy. As a concession to Roman tastes, he permitted the eating of pork. Some Muslim polemicists, following Jewish sources like the Toledoth Yeshû’ ⁽²¹⁾ , held that Paul only pretended to convert to Christianity with the intention of corrupting Christian faith and condemning its followers to hell. Ibn Hazm applies to him the epithet al-lâ’in (the accursed) ⁽²²⁾ , while Al-Qarâfi ⁽²³⁾  called him “a devil for Christians” (Iblis ‘ala al-Nasâra).

A second factor in the corruption of Christianity is the Church Councils, particularly that of Nicea. While the early polemicists were content to argue that the Nicene Creed was in contradiction to the Christian Scripture or that it was unreasonable and internally contradictory, later polemicists became interested in the implications of the conciliar system. By granting the role of distinguishing between correct belief and heterodoxy to their bishops, who in the Creed drew up and imposed on believers the normative formulation of Christian doctrine, Christians had conceded to their leaders a function that properly belongs to God and which God communicates only through the prophets.
Ibn Taymiyya introduced an ingenious innovation to this current of polemic. He made extensive use of the Annals of Sa’îd ibn Bitrîq ⁽²⁴⁾ , the 10^th century Melkite bishop of Alexandria known in Greek and Latin sources as “Eutychius,”, to show the progressive replacement of prophetic religion with innovated practices adopted from pagan rites and customs. Although aware of earlier Muslim writings against Paul, Ibn Taymiyya shows little interest in the role of Paul in corrupting the religion of Christ. ⁽²⁵⁾  To him, it is the role of the Church Councils that is central: Christians have made the basis of their faith a creed that has no historical relationship to any prophet. Revelation comes only through the prophets, but the creed, written over three hundred years after the death of Jesus and the apostles, can in no way be linked directly to the prophet Jesus or to his immediate companions.

6. The superiority of Islam. The final stream of polemic to be mentioned holds that purely on grounds of common sense, human dignity, the glory of God, and the advancement of society, Islam must be considered superior to Christianity and all other religions. In this argument by comparison, the cultic practices and moral imperatives of Islam are juxtaposed to those of Christianity and deemed more excellent. Al-Qarâfi criticizes Christians for lacking a developed sharî’a and claims that the lack of a comprehensive religious law which covers the minutiae of daily life has led them to rely on the civil ruler to apply justice. He points to instances of summary and capricious judgment handed down in the Crusader kingdom of Acre as evidence of the unjust consequences people suffer from the lack of an all-embracing religious law.

Perhaps the finest work of this type is that of the 10^th century philosopher Al-’Âmiri ⁽²⁶⁾ , for whom Islam offers the practices of worship most befitting the servanthood of man and the lordship of God, the most enlightened and adequate protection of the weak and defenseless, the most stable and comprehensive law for structuring society, and the best environment for the development of conceptual and integrative learning. Although this argument had been presented in seminal form in Ali al-Tabari’s 9^th century work, Kitâb al-dîn wal-dawla ⁽²⁷⁾ , Al-’Âmiri was the first to develop this argument in detailed and extensive fashion. Al-’Âmiri’s thinking had great influence on Ibn Taymiyya, whose final response to Paul of Antioch takes up these themes in attempting to show the superiority of Islam over Christianity.

Arguments by comparison are by their nature highly subjective and, removed from their historical context, can appear quite arbitrary. In Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh, Ibn Taymiyya argues that Jews generally consider Islam superior to Christianity, while Christians prefer Islam to Judaism. Since no one is impartial in relation to one’s own religion, this amounts to a general recognition of the superiority of Islam. Ibn Taymiyya’s argument was not original. As early as the 10^th century, the Jewish Andalusian statesman Hasdai ibn Shaprut recounted the tale of the Khazar King Bulan. ⁽²⁸⁾  Seeking to determine the best religion for his people, Bulan called in a Christian priest and asked: “Which is superior, the religion of the Jews or that of the Muslims?”The priest answered “that of the Jews.” Similarly, a qadi was summoned and asked which is preferable, the religion of Jews or that of Christians. He answered “that of the Jews.” Bulan then commanded that the religion of the Khazar people should be Judaism.

Although self-serving, such appeals to public opinion cannot be summarily dismissed. They often reflect historical situations such as, in the case of Ibn Taymiyya, negative attitudes towards Christians in the post-Crusader Middle East and, in the case of ibn Shaprut, fellow feeling between Jews and Muslims in Andalus vis-a-vis the “Christian threat” from the North. At any given time and place one religious group appears less threatening and easier to live with than another. One wonders how modern Jews, Christians and Muslims in diverse societies would respond to a similar query about the relative superiority of their neighbors’ religions.

    Ibn Taymiyya’s response to Paul of Antioch: the climax of a tradition

By the time Ibn Taymiyya wrote his critique of Christianity in the early 14^th century, all these strands of polemic had already been developed. Ibn Taymiyya’s use of these polemical currents was wholly his own and directed less at Paul of Antioch, whose work had already been in circulation for over two centuries, than at the theological controversies that abounded within the Islamic community of his time. He sought to show that the same type of errors made by Christians in “changing the religion of Christ” were being proposed by contemporary Muslims. Unless Muslims rejected these tendencies toward unwarranted innovation in theology and practice, he warned, they too would depart from the sound teaching found in the Qur’ân and hadîth and fall into error.

What I propose to do in the forthcoming chapters is to offer a contemporary rereading of the polemical debate between these two medieval authors. I will take up the main points raised by Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya’s refutations and then explore the ways in which modern Christians and Muslims are reformulating and discussing the same issues. Thus, for each topic we will review the medieval presentation by Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya and then move into the issues as they appear today. For our purposes, it is convenient that Paul of Antioch’s main points, five in all, were taken up systematically by Ibn Taymiyya one-by-one.

1. Paul of Antioch did not deny the prophethood of Muhammad. He admitted that he could be considered a prophet to the pagan Arabs, but since Christians had already received their revelation from God in Christ, they were not called to Islam. To this, Ibn Taymiyya responded that the Qur’ân itself claims that Muhammad was sent with a universal message to humankind and that were the Qur’ân to be erroneous in that claim, it could not be accepted as a divinely revealed Book. Thus, Christians also are called to Islam. This debate will lead us into a discussion of Islamic and Christian prophetology and the key issue of Muhammad’s prophetic status in a Christian theology of religions.

2. Secondly, Paul of Antioch claims that the Qur’ân confirms the earlier sacred Books of Jews and Christians and denies textual corruption. Ibn Taymiyya’s response is quite interesting. While holding that Christians can claim nothing in Islamic sources that would affirm the textual authenticity of Jewish and Christian Scriptures, he maintains a prudent skepticism on whether any textual corruption has actually taken place. This argument will lead us into a discussion of the textual question of Christian and Islamic Scriptures.

3. In his third point, Paul of Antioch contends that Christian Trinitarian belief is an affirmation of monotheism, which he proposes as belief in One God with three essential names, characteristics, or aspects. Ibn Taymiyya responds that Christian Trinitarian theology, while not teaching gross polytheism, nevertheless denies absolute monotheism, as do many incorrect views proposed by Muslims. Thus, the question of how Christian Trinitarian belief relates to divine Oneness is joined and will be examined in the light of modern Christian theology and Islamic thought.

4. Paul of Antioch’s treatment of Christ’s death and resurrection is limited to arguing that these events affected Christ’s human nature, not his divine nature. He does not explore the possibility of any universal significance for humankind of Christ’s death on the cross. Ibn Taymiyya argues that the concept of redemption is both unnecessary and demeaning to the nature of God. To these views, we will ask whether the Christian concept of redemption responds to a perennial problem intrinsic to human life in this world that neither Muslims nor Christians can afford to avoid.

5. The Christian’s final point moves his treatise from defence to attack, from apology to polemic. Revealed religion, he claims, is of two kinds: religion of law, represented by Judaism, and religion of grace, which is Christianity. In Christ, religion has reached perfection; consequently, Islam is superfluous. Ibn Taymiyya responds that perfect religion must combine law and grace. Law without grace is harsh and oppressive. Grace or love without law is ineffective. Only Islam perfectly combines both elements of law and grace. Thus our final topic will deal with religion in its aspects of law and grace, in other words, the role and achievement of religion as it is actually lived in this world.

     2. THE CHRISTIAN PROPHET AND THE PROPHET OF ISLAM

Near the middle of the 12^th Century, Paul of Antioch, Melkite bishop of Saida in modern Lebanon, wrote a short treatise of 24 pages entitled “A Letter to a Muslim” as an apologetic defence of the continuing validity of the Christian religion even after the prophetic mission of Muhammad. The Muslim to whom his treatise is addressed cannot be identified, and it is quite possible that the Muslim interlocutor was a literary device meant to give a personal character to what is basically a theoretical defence of Christianity against Muslim charges. Unlike Paul’s other polemical writings - against pagans, Jews, and Christian groups whom he deemed heretical - Paul’s “Letter to a Muslim” is quite conciliatory. He breaks with the Christian polemical tradition by neither attacking Islam nor denying the prophethood of Muhammad or the revealed nature of the Qur’ân.

All these he accepts but reinterprets in the light of Christian faith. He accepts Muhammad as a prophet sent to the pagan Arabs of his time, who brought to those Arabs a revealed Book in their own language and established for them a religion far superior to the pagan religion of Arabia which they had been following. He claims that the Qur’ânic revelation and the Islamic religion founded upon it was never intended for Christians, who already professed a revealed religion and already had Scriptures in their own languages. He buttresses his argument with Qur’anic citations which praise and confirm the Sacred Books possessed by Jews and Christians. He attempts to counter arguments for the universality of Islam based on Qur’anic verses which imply a universal prophetic mission for Muhammad (e.g., the verse, “Anyone who desires something other than Islam as a religion will never have it accepted from him, Qr 3:85),” by claiming that such verses are directed exclusively towards the pagan Arabs of the Jahiliyya. The conclusion Paul expects to be drawn is that Islam, while possessing its own delimited validity, is basically irrelevant to Christian faith and has nothing to offer Christians.

As on the subsequent points raised by Paul, Ibn Taymiyya’s response is far lengthier and more nuanced than the argumentation proposed by the Christian. To the argument on the particular nature of Muhammad’s prophetic mission, which occupied a few pages in the work of Paul of Antioch, Ibn Taymiyya replied with a 175-page response that could virtually stand as an independent treatise on the universal nature of the prophethood of Muhammad.

Beginning from Paul of Antioch’s assumption that Muhammad was a prophet sent with a revealed message to the pagan Arabs, Ibn Taymiyya builds his case step-by-step.
1) The Qur’ân claims that Muhammad’s prophetic mission was universal, its message intended for all humans, including Christians.
2) It is clear from the Qur’ân that Muhammad understood his message as meant for all humanity.
3) The Qur’ân accuses Christians of unbelief for not accepting Muhammad as prophet and the Qur’anic message which he brought.
4) The Qur’anic citations that refer to Muhammad’s prophetic mission to the pagan Arabs do not contradict other Qur’anic claims to the universality of that mission. Just as Jesus’ understanding of his mission progressed from being sent “to the lost sheep of the twelve tribes of Israel” to an awareness that he was sent to all people, so it must be granted that Muhammad’s prophetic career could have undergone similar progression. Even if one were to read early Meccan passages as indications of Muhammad’s mission to the Quraysh, revelations from the Madina period clearly attest to a universal mission. According to accepted principles of Qur’anic interpretation, passages revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career would abrogate those delivered earlier.

He concludes his response by addressing two views rejecting the prophethood of Muhammad which, although not found in the treatise of Paul of Antioch, had often been expressed by Christians. The first is whether it is possible to admit a type of limited prophetic role for Muhammad whereby he was truly sent by God to the Arabs of the Jahiliyya, but hold that later in his prophetic career he deluded himself into thinking of his prophetic mission as extending to all humankind, when in fact it was not. He could have been an upright individual, a profoundly religious man, even a regional prophet sent to the pagan Arabs, but nevertheless mistaken in his belief that he was the Seal of the Prophets sent to all people with the complete, final, and perfect revelation.

To this hypothesis, Ibn Taymiyya responds that such delusions or misconceptions are possible for anyone other than prophets, but that God never allows a true prophet to deliver a message which contains even partial error. To claim error in a prophetic message is tantamount to denying the prophethood of the messenger. Thus, since Muhammad clearly claimed to be a universal prophet, one must accept his claim to universality or else deny that he was any prophet at all.

His last point rejects this final possibility, that is, that Muhammad was not a prophet. This is Ibn Taymiyya’s least original line of argumentation, in which he basically reiterates the proofs by which Muslims had traditionally argued that Muhammad was a prophet. It should be noted that the final 400 pages of Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh contain a well thought-out apologia for the prophethood of Muhammad. This would appear to have been originally an independent work by Ibn Taymiyya to prove the prophethood of Muhammad, which was later in the manuscript tradition attached to the manuscript of the same author’s response to Paul of Antioch. ⁽²⁹⁾  Since there is no reference to Paul of Antioch or to his treatise in these final 400 pages, and since Paul never denied the prophethood of Muhammad in the first place, it may be surmised that Ibn Taymiyya’s apologetic treatise in defense of Muhammad’s prophethood antedated his response to Paul of Antioch.

     The debate as it is seen today

As we read this debate at a distance of seven centuries, we find that many of the basic issues are still being raised, in novel forms, in our own time. From the point of view of Christians, the central questions revolve about the understanding of prophecy and revelation in light of a Christian faith response to the event of Christ’s life, death and resurrection. While not compromising their conviction of what they believe that God has done in the person of Jesus Christ, can Christians accept Muhammad as a prophet and, if so, what kind of prophet could they see him to be? What implications does an affirmation of extra-Biblical or post-Biblical prophecy carry for a Christian understanding of revelation? On the other hand, if Christians accept Muhammad as a prophet, why should they not accept as well the revelation he brought and enter Islam?
The questions raised for Muslims in this debate determine their evaluation of the continuing validity of the earlier messages and the faith communities formed by those messages. Must Muslims consider Judaism and Christianity to be superseded faiths, founded on genuine prophetic messages but abrogated by God’s later message brought by Muhammad? Is dialogue possible between the three communities if two are judged to be relics of earlier revelations which have been possibly corrupted and in any case supplanted by the final revelation? On the other hand, what evidence might Muslims find in the Qur’ân and hadîth for accepting Jews and Christians as fellow believers in a family of faiths in a direct line from Abraham?

This is not simply a theoretical issue of interest only to specialists, but affects the way that ordinary Muslims and Christians regard one another. In the course of my encounters with Muslims, the question has often been raised. My students in Turkey and Indonesia have candidly articulated their perception of the problem in terms of fairness and reciprocity. “We Muslims recognize your prophet Jesus,” they state. “Why do you Christians not recognize Muhammad as prophet?” What answer can Christians give to this quite reasonable inquiry?

     The Nostra aetate statement on Muslims

The decree of the Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council, Nostra aetate, with its radically original attempt to reorient the attitude of Christians toward Muslims, has had great impact on the way that Catholic Christians regard Islam. When the document was promulgated in 1965, it would have been difficult to find empirical evidence for the opening affirmation: “The [Catholic] Church has high regard for Muslims.” ⁽³⁰⁾  The spontaneous reaction of many Christians to this assertion must have been a surprised “We do?”

The Nostra aetate decree goes on to offer grounds for this esteem, mentioning Muslim commitment to the One God, Islamic practices of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and the honor given by Muslims to Jesus and Mary and concludes by urging Christians and Muslims to move beyond past misunderstandings and conflicts to recognize that they have a common mission in today’s world, that of promoting and preserving “peace, liberty, social justice, and moral values.”

On the one hand, one can see a surprisingly positive reception of Nostra aetate in the Catholic Church. The present Pope has met with Muslims over 50 times, far more than all previous popes in history combined, and Christian-Muslim encounters have been initiated in virtually every country where the two communities live together, as well as numerous international meetings, seminars, and conferences. The World Council of Churches, along with national and regional councils and international confessional bodies such as the World Assembly of Reformed Churches and the Lutheran World Federation, have issued their own statements of position vis-a-vis Muslims. For their part, Muslim organizations have undertaken initiatives to arrive at a rapprochement with Christians and have promoted projects of cooperation.

On the other hand, it must be admitted that all the study sessions, conferences and dialogue encounters are merely scratching the surface in terms of reaching rank-and-file believers. It would be presumptuous to claim that Nostra aetate has inaugurated a new age in which all problems between Muslims and Christians can be solved through discussion and mutual esteem. Many of the old problems remain, and new problems of a political or ethnic nature have arisen since the publication of Nostra aetate. Regions where people had for years prided themselves on good interreligious relations, such as Lebanon, Bosnia, and Indonesia, have been torn apart in conflicts of which religion has been a factor.

Although the Second Vatican Council has it has not put an end to centuries of suspicion, antagonism, and conflict between Christians and Muslim, one can still confidently claim that the Nostra aetate document has, at least among Catholics, produced widespread attitudinal changes in a relatively brief period and has been generally welcomed by Muslims. Nevertheless, the document has been subjected to criticism by both Muslims and Christians for what it does not state. The Nostra aetate passage on “Muslims” contains no reference to the religion of Islam, nor to Muhammad or the Qur’ân. How, ask the critics, can Christians possibly produce a document meant to build mutual respect and esteem between the two communities which makes no mention of the Islamic religion as such, of its Prophet or its Sacred Book?

     What can Christians say about the prophethood of Muhammad?

In my opinion, this criticism, while well meant, is begging the question. The question is not what Christians would have to say about Islam, Muhammad and the Qur’ân in order to present themselves as friendly, respectful and fair-minded. Such would amount to a type of condescending courtesy or a public relations ploy. The real question is what can Christians say about the prophethood of Muhammad and the revealed nature of the Qur’ân and remain, at the same time, faithful to the Christian faith handed down from the apostles?

This is an important matter for theological research and speculation among Christians, and we are far from reaching a consensus or even a clear understanding of what can be said that is in accord with Biblical teaching and Christian tradition. For this reason, I am quite satisfied with the prudent silence of the Second Vatican Council on this issue. Instead of making a declaration on Muhammad and the Qur’ân which later generations might find restrictive, untenable or embarrassing, the question is left open for the continuing research and reflection of theologians.

It is a recurrent temptation for religious groups to feel they must take a position on every issue that might possibly be raised, as though somehow the comprehensive nature of one’s faith would be called into question by a frank admission that we do not know, or at least we are not all yet in agreement, on a given issue. The Church continues to grow in understanding the manifold implications of Christian faith, but this growth toward deeper appreciation cannot be forced.

The official silence of the Churches on the prophethood of Muhammad can only be defended, however, if Christians are conscientiously engaged in seeking an adequate response. As Cardinal Tarancon, Archbishop of Madrid, said at the 1974 Muslim-Christian Congress of Cordoba, “How is it possible to appreciate Islam and Muslims without showing appreciation for the Prophet of Islam and the values he promoted? Not to do this would not only be a lack of respect, to which the Council exhorts Christians, but also neglect of a religious factor of which account must be taken in theological reflection and religious awareness.” ⁽³¹⁾ 

In the past century, a number of Christian scholars and theologians of various Churches raised the question of the prophethood of Muhammad. In the years preceding the Second Vatican Council, the seminal if often idiosyncratic explorations of Catholic scholars such as Louis Massignon, Charles Ledit, Giulio Basetti-Sani, Yves Mubarrak, and Michel Hayek raised the question of what the prophethood of Muhammad might mean for Christians. In recent times, Catholic theologians such as Jacques Jomier, Louis Gardet, Maurice Borrmans, and Hans Küng have contributed their insights, as have Orthodox scholars such as Bishop George Khodr, Christophe Jibara and Nazmi Luqa, Anglicans like Kenneth Cragg and Montgomery Watt, and in the Reformation tradition, Willem Bijlefeld, Jan Slomp, and David Kerr. ⁽³²⁾ 

All these Christian scholars have moved far from the polemical view that Muhammad was an imposter, madman or ambitious visionary who took advantage of the Arabs’ gullibility to set himself up as religious founder, political leader and social arbiter. These 20^th century thinkers recognize the sincerity of Muhammad’s religious experience and his sense of mission to bring a divine message to those around him. But they can call Muhammad a prophet? What would such an affirmation mean to Christians, and would it mean to Muslims?

    Islamic concept of prophecy

The problem that always arises when Christians and Muslims discuss the question of prophecy is that the term is ambivalent and is used diversely by Muslims and Christians. Islamic and Christian teaching is in agreement on many elements of prophecy and prophethood, but on key points the theological content borne by these terms is not identical or even compatible. This ambiguity colors every discussion between the followers of the two religions and is intensified by a similar lack of congruity in the concept of revelation as understood by the Islamic and Christian faiths.

In the course of almost every series of lectures on Christian theology that I have delivered to Muslim ilâhiyât students, at some point the question is asked: “It is a pillar of faith that Muslims must believe in all the revealed Books, including the Torah brought by Moses, the Injîl (Gospel) brought by Jesus and the Qur’ân brought by Muhammad. But you Christians have four Gospels. Which one is the Gospel brought by Jesus?” They are startled when I answer that Christians do not believe that Jesus brought any book at all.

The question raised by these students follows logically from Islamic prophetology. God selected certain individuals to whom God revealed, through the action of the Holy Spirit - identified in Islam with the angel Gabriel - a message. In the case of most prophets, the message took the form of verbal utterances, but a few prophets or messengers (the relationship of the Arabic terms nabi and rasûl is disputed by Qur’anic exegetes), brought written messages or “Books.”

These books are not the products of the prophet’s hand or mind, but the direct speech of God in human language. One cannot speak of what Muhammad said or wrote in the Qur’ân, but rather of what God said and taught and commanded in the Qur’anic message. The prophet’s role is limited to being a faithful conveyer of the message entrusted to him. In the important doctrine of ismâ’, the messenger is preserved by God from both intentional and inadvertent error in whatever he claims to bring from God and, according to many scholars, the prophets’ infallibility is accompanied by impeccability or sinlessness. ⁽³³⁾ 

Some modern Muslim scholars have challenged what they call a “mechanistic” understanding of prophetic revelation. The most notable is the late Fazlur Rahman, who based his argument for a more complex process of revelation on what the Qur’ân says about itself. While affirming that the Qur’anic revelations originate wholly from God, he asks how the eternal - thus, pre-verbal - message of God reaches the prophet in human words. Following the views of the 18^th century Indian scholar Shah Waliullah, he holds that “the verbal revelations occur in the words, idioms, and styles which are already existent in the mind of the prophet.” ⁽³⁴⁾  Again following Shah Waliullah, Rahman concludes that God sent down the Qur’ân and the previous revealed Books “in a nebulous and undifferentiated manner” into the “heart” of the prophet. Then, when the occasion arose during the prophetic mission of Muhammad, God produced well-strung speech from the rational faculties of the Prophet through the agency of the angel.

According to this theory of revelation, the prophet is no mere mechanical transmitter of divine oracles, but rather a person chosen by God whose acquired information, contemporary experiences, and personal struggles are relevant to the content of the revealed message and constitute the raw material from which God produces the eternal message in human words. Fazlur Rahman’s theory of Qur’anic revelation can be seen as a development of the studies on the asbâb al-nuzûl in the tafsîr tradition of Qur’ân commentaries. The asbâb al-nuzûl are “the occasions for revelation,” and Qur’ân commentators have, down the centuries, sought to locate the specific occasion for the revelation of each Qur’anic verse at its proper moment in the life of Muhammad.

The chief motivation for this study is to determine the chronology of the revelation of Qur’anic verses, which is essential for application of the legal principle of abrogation according to which a verse revealed later in Muhammad’s prophetic career will, mutatis mutandis, abrogate one revealed earlier. In the thought of Fazlur Rahman, the asbâb al-nuzûl are relevant not only for determining chronology but for understanding the manner and content of the revelation itself. God’s eternal, non-verbal revelation, placed in the “heart” of Muhammad, that is, in the depths of his personality, is formed by God, through the agency of Gabriel, into words - that is, the text of the Qur’ân - in the context of Muhammad’s knowledge, language, and existential situation. This concept of prophecy, however, has not been widely accepted by Muslims. Fazlur Rahman had to leave his post as Director of the Islamic Research Centre in Islamabad after he was accused of holding that “the Qur’ân is the Word of God and also the word of Muhammad.” Fazlur Rahman always denied this accusation and claimed that it was a misrepresentation of his position. ⁽³⁵⁾ 

Despite the views of Shah Waliullah and Fazlur Rahman which would appear to arrive at positions not widely divergent from a Christian understanding of Biblical revelation, it must be stated that the weight of Islamic tradition has favored a concept of revelation which distances the revealed message from the life and personality of the prophet. The prophet brings a message which he has received from wholly outside of himself and which in no way “belongs” to him. Muhammad is seen by Muslims not only as the conveyer of the message, but as its first hearer, the model Muslim who lived fully in accord with the message he received. But, according to traditional Islamic doctrine, he was in no way involved in the production of that message.

     Christian concept of prophethood

Whatever Christians say about Muhammad as prophet, however, must be explored in the context of what prophethood means in Christian, not Islamic, terms. In my view, this is where many Christian thinkers, including Paul of Antioch, set themselves an impossible task. They begin from an Islamic understanding of prophecy and its characteristics as recognized by Muslims. Then, arguing within the Islamic conception, they try to acknowledge or reject Muhammad as one of the prophets. It is important, I feel, to recognize from the outset that in reference to the phenomenon of prophets and prophecy, Christians and Muslims do not mean exactly the same thing.

The Christian view of prophecy can be illustrated by reference to the thought of the prominent Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner who, in his article on “Prophetism” in the theological compendium Sacramentum Mundi, lists the following characteristics of the prophet:
The prophet always comes with a new message and has to produce his own credentials, The uniqueness of his vocation is essential to the prophet. He is the religious revolutionary, the critic of society, and does not confine himself to truths which become immediately perspicuous to hearers. He sees himself as the instrument of the personal, living God, bringing a message not meant for himself alone, but primarily for others. The “word” is constitutive of the prophet and his mission. In his criticism of religion and society and interpretation of historical events, the prophet actually exerts an influence upon events by making known their real depth and truth and by offering a new and forward-looking situation in his criticism of society. In seeking to transform the status quo, the prophet is the organizer of religious and social changes and thus institutionalizes his message. ⁽³⁶⁾ 

The prophet is distinguished from other religious figures - the priest, the mystic, the diviner, and the teacher of wisdom precisely by his claim to be “bearer of revelation.” The prophet is convinced that what he proclaims is not his own teaching but God’s own message. He does not restate traditional teaching in the manner of a preacher nor offer his own insight into what has been previously revealed, as does the theologian. What he brings is a new revelation which he received from God. Islam. Without credentials beyond his own claim to bear a divine message, the prophet is the charismatic outsider both separate from and critical of the political and religious establishment.

Thus far, Rahner’s treatment could be read as a thoroughly Islamic treatment of al-nubuwwa, or prophethood, in Islam. That Muslims would immediately recognize the prophetic mission of Muhammad in Rahner’s description is an indication of how much Christians and Muslims have in common in their concepts of prophethood. The correspondence with religions of South Asian or East Asian provenance, for example, would be much less.

Here Rahner is speaking primarily of the legati divini of the Old and New Testaments, but adds that this does not mean that there have been no true prophets outside the Bible. He distinguishes between the specific revelation found in the Bible and a universal or general history of divine revelation which occurs throughout human history. ⁽³⁷⁾  This genuine, grace-given history of revelation is inconceivable if it has not been concretely realized at specific moments of human history. As God’s grace-filled general revelation is translated into words, the phenomenon of prophecy, he holds, must occur again and again in the general history of revelation.

This is not an eccentric theological position. In his catechesis of 9 September 1998, Pope John Paul II seems to indicate that other religions - in their foundation, doctrines and practices - are inspired by the Spirit at work in the lives and religious experiences of prophetic figures. He states:
“The quest of the human spirit for truth and goodness...is inspired by the Holy Spirit. The various religions arose precisely from this primordial openness to God. At their origins we often find founders who, aided by God’s Spirit, achieved a deeper religious experience. Handed on to others, this experience took form in the doctrines, rites and precepts of the various religions.” ⁽³⁸⁾ 

The Pope is referring to God’s action of guidance and self-revelation in human history whereby the Holy Spirit, acting “outside the confines of the visible Church,” as the Vatican Council documents put it ⁽³⁹⁾ , guides certain individuals to a new experience of God and a mission to communicate this message to others. What results from this prophetic mission is the community of companions and first followers who become the nucleus of the new religion brought by the prophet.

Moreover, according to Rahner, the “pre-Christian” period need not have ended chronologically at the same time in all the regions and situations of salvation. He allows for the possibility of prophets appearing historically after the time of Christ. ⁽⁴⁰⁾  It is worth noting that he is speaking not only of geographical regions but more broadly of human situations where God’s self-revelation and saving grace precede any knowledge of Christ on the part of the human recipient. In this treatment of the phenomenon of prophecy, there would seem to be two areas for further study by Christian and Muslim scholars. The first is the correspondence between what Rahner calls “grace-filled general revelation,” that is, God’s universal self-revelation in history which goes beyond the specific revelation contained in the Bible, and the Islamic concept of the dîn al-fitra, the one, primordial, natural religion which God places in the heart of every individual. Thus, Islam teaches that each person is born with a natural orientation to worship and obey the One God, an inclination vitiated solely through upbringing and societal pressure. This view is based on a well-know hadith from Muhammad states: “Every infant is born according to the fitra (‘ala ‘l-fitra), then his parents make him a Jew or a Christian or a Magian.” The din al-fitra could thus be understood as that which is in common among the various shari’as as well as the broad lines of prophetic religion on which all monotheists believe. ⁽⁴¹⁾ 

Secondly, there is the idea that as God’s general revelation is actualized, the phenomenon of prophecy occurs over and over again in human history. In other words, not all instances of genuine prophethood are mentioned in the Biblical books, whose specific revelation always, for a Christian, ultimately refers to Christ. Here we find an interesting correspondence with Islamic teaching which never claims that all prophets have been mentioned in the Qur’ân. Most commentators list approximately 26 prophets and messengers mentioned by name in the Qur’ân, although a sound hadîth from Muhammad puts the total number of prophets in human history at 124,000. This is almost certainly a symbolic number indicating that the phenomenon of genuine prophethood, and thus revelation, has occurred countless times in human history.

     Divergence between Christian and Muslim views of prophethood

However, Rahner holds - and here emerges a key difference between the Christian and Islamic understanding of prophethood - that this historical actualization may be partially defective or its relevance limited to certain areas and periods of history. In other words, not all instances of prophecy are equally universal in scope nor of equal relevance for all times and places. In Islam, the issue is complex, but here too there is material for further study. For Muslims, the complete, final, and inerrant character of Muhammad’s prophetic message are unquestionable marks of his prophetic work. However, the conviction that only the Qur’ân presents the final and perfect revelation presumes that other genuine revelations and prophetic missions, which are neither complete nor definitive, have preceded the Qur’anic revelation, in other words, partial and limited expressions of the prophetic mission.

Moreover, for Christians, prophethood implies neither infallibility nor impeccability whereas, as we have seen in Ibn Taymiyya’s response, even inadvertent error is excluded from the Islamic concept of prophecy. As the notion was developed within the Islamic kalâm tradition, the concept of ismâ’ or inerrancy which characterizes the prophet also came to include impeccability, although for Ibn Taymiyya, prophetic ismâ’ need not include sinlessness. ⁽⁴²⁾ 

For both Christians and Muslims, the question comes down to one of the criterion by which the true prophet is distinguished from the false. For a Christian, that criterion, according to Rahner, is the prophet’s relationship to Jesus Christ who, for Christians, is the great prophet, the incomparable paradigm who not only completely fulfills but defines the genre.

The Gospel accounts envision Jesus as the awaited eschatological prophet even more than as the awaited Messianic king. Edward Schillebeeckx, in his monumental work, Jesus: an Experiment in Christology, traces all the Christological understandings in the New Testament to the underlying affirmation of Jesus as the eschatological prophet. ⁽⁴³⁾  He notes the fundamental tension and often direct opposition between the Spirit-filled prophet, whose tongue is like a sharp sword, who confronts powerful evildoers and brings peace, justice and liberation to the poor and oppressed, and the anointed Messianic figure that the Gospels are hesitant to identify with Jesus. Roger Haight describes Jesus’ prophetic mission as follows: “In the name of God Jesus confronted ideas and practices that were in place, preached reversals of commonly accepted ways of doing things, criticized religious institutions, and confronted people with a message from God.” ⁽⁴⁴⁾ 

For Christians, Jesus is the preeminent and definitive prophet and the criterion by which the true prophet is distinguished from pseudo-prophets. This assertion is likely to challenge Christians, who are not accustomed to thinking of Jesus Christ in terms of being the preeminent and definitive prophet, but will be less astonishing for Muslims, for they affirm Muhammad’s prophetic role in precisely those terms.

It would seem that the Christian and Islamic understandings of prophethood are theological reflexes, in the sense that the respective characteristics of Christian or Islamic prophet are defined according to the qualities discovered in the one who embodies and epitomizes the prophet par excellence in each faith. Just as Christians base their concept of prophethood on what they believe that God has revealed, taught and accomplished in Christ, so Muslims begin from the role of Muhammad as bringer of the final and perfect revelation and construct from that the Islamic understanding of what constitutes a prophet.

     The prophet and the message

Where Islam focuses on the Qur’an as God’s definitive revealed message, Christianity focuses on the person of Christ as the embodiment of the deepest revelation of God’s nature and will. As such, for their criterion by which prophecy is to be judged, Christians look not to any Sacred Book but to the person of Christ as the criterion by which prophecy is judged. For Christians, God reveals God’s own self in Jesus Christ who incorporates the divine revelation in his own person. “In these last days, God has spoken to us through His son...the radiant light of God’s glory and the perfect copy of God’s nature” (Hebrews 1:2-3). For Christians, Jesus does not bring a revelation or sacred book from God, which is a central function of the prophetic mission as conceived by Islam. Rather, he is the message, the revelation to which the Scriptural books bear witness. As prophet, his critique of society and religiosity does not arise from a revelation received from outside himself which he then conveys to people, but emerges from his own unique relationship to God. This message of God’s sovereignty and saving efficacy Jesus conveys both through his teaching in parables, in deeds of healing, exorcism, and raising the dead, in symbolic actions of eating with sinners, baptism in the Jordan, washing the feet of the disciples, the Eucharistic sharing of bread and wine, and in the ultimate disclosure of the meaning of his life in his death and resurrection.

In other words, the early disciples were convinced that what was communicated to them was a human person who, through his unique prophetic relationship to God, revealed God’s nature, God’s will, and God’s power to save. As the revelatory anecdotes and accounts of “this man Jesus” were orally handed down and eventually written in Gospel form, the logia were not regarded as prophetic oracles, but rather as testimonies pointing beyond themselves to the revelation which the disciples believed to be found in the person of Christ. This explains the lack of interest shown by the Evangelists and their communities in the ipsissima verba of Jesus and the freedom which the Evangelists felt was theirs to restructure the transmitted materials in order to better enunciate their theology or faith vision. I will treat this issue further in the next chapter. The point here is that the early Christian communities and their Evangelists did not regard the Gospels (and a fortiori the other New Testament Scriptures) as divine messages delivered from God by the prophet Jesus, but rather as witnesses of faith to the revelation they had found in Christ.

If in Christianity, it is ultimately Christ, not the Biblical text, who is the criterion by which true prophecy is discerned, in Islam, it is the Qur’ân, not the person of Muhammad, which forms the definitive criterion for distinguishing true from false and right from wrong. This conviction is expressed in the Qur’anic understanding of itself as al-furqân, the Criterion. The Islamic principle for discerning between sound affirmations of Christian faith, such as Jesus’ birth from the Virgin Mary, the miracles wrought by Jesus, his nature as faithful servant of God etc., and those beliefs considered erroneous such as the crucifixion, the divine Sonship etc. is their congruence with or divergence from what is taught in the Qur’ân.

     What can a Christian say?

What then can a Christian say about the prophethood of Muhammad? Muhammad certainly fulfills the characteristics of prophethood according to the Christian understanding, but Christians can never accept Muhammad as prophet according to an Islamic concept of prophethood. It would be difficult to find a clearer instance of grace-filled, extra-Biblical, general revelation concretized in a specific, prophetic mission than in what God accomplished in Muhammad.

However, for a Christian to accept Muhammad as prophet in the Islamic sense would be to accept claims for Muhammad, such as verbal inerrancy and sinlessness, that Christians would not make for other prophetic figures and Scriptural authors. Moreover, whereas Muslims find in the Qur’ân the criterion by which the truth of other messages is discerned, for Christians, it is Christ, God’s definitive Word or incarnated Logos who is the criterion by which elements of truth in Qur’anic teaching and all other revelations are discerned. The very understanding of what prophecy is and whether a certain individual should be seen as a prophet depends on the more fundamental task of identifying the criteria on which such judgments are to be made. Thus, Muslims rightly affirm the prophethood of Muhammad, as did Ibn Taymiyya, on the basis of what is found in the Qur’anic revelation. Christians must answer the question of Muhammad’s prophethood according to their understanding of God’s self-revelation in Christ.

Speaking or writing as a Christian among other Christians, I find myself proposing the disturbing and often unwelcome suggestion that Muhammad was a prophetic figure with a prophetic mission. In his continuous emphasis on submitting one’s life to God, on carrying out God’s will in all things, on allowing God to rule over every aspect of human life, in his consistent concern for God’s sovereignty, God’s ongoing creative power, God’s superabundant mercy and forgiveness, in the ethical and ritual demands to which he called people, in his continuous calls to worship, praise, and thank the Benevolent One, I hold that Muhammad was a prophet preaching the Kingdom of God. Paradoxically, among Muslims, who I would expect to be more appreciative of such an affirmation, I am reluctant to affirm the prophethood of Muhammad because of implications that such an assertion bears which I cannot profess.

     The limitations of the debate

To return to the medieval debate, Ibn Taymiyya is consistent in his logic that one who admits the prophethood of Muhammad, as it is understood by Islam, should properly accept the message he brought as definitive and become a Muslim. Paul of Antioch put himself in an indefensible position by claiming more than he knows. Once the role of Muhammad as Islamic prophet is admitted, it follows that he cannot err in anything he claims to have brought from God. Ibn Taymiyya’s response simply followed out Paul’s conclusions by repeating the Qur’anic assertions about itself.

On the other hand, Ibn Taymiyya’s argument can be no more than an ad hominem argument against Paul of Antioch’s gratuitous premise. Ibn Taymiyya’s response is based on a circular argument, namely: we know that Muhammad claimed to be a universal prophet because this is what the Qur’an teaches. The Qur’ân teaches only what is true because it is a book revealed by God through the agency of a true prophet.

The debate over the prophethood of Muhammad between Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya is a good example of why polemics fail to convince modern people (and, perhaps, the polemicists’ contemporaries as well.) Muslims and Christians must be aware of the limitations of logical argumentation to “prove” the authenticity of their respective faiths. When applied to faith convictions, human logic must continually produce circular arguments. If Christians accuse Ibn Taymiyya of employing a circular argument, they must be ready to admit their own. Christians believe that Jesus is the Christ, the preeminent prophet, the Son of God, because the New Testament bears witness to this. The New Testament writings can be believed because they were inspired by the Holy Spirit whom Christ, the preeminent prophet, the Son of God, sent upon the apostles.

In discussions between Muslims and Christians, I believe that it is important to admit frankly that our convictions concerning God’s intervention in human history are founded on premises that are neither logically demonstrable nor ultimately compatible. This does not imply that neither Christians nor Muslims have any rational basis for their faiths, but rather that the faith commitment comes first and the role of reason is to support and interpret that faith.

When a prophet appears on the scene, claiming to bear a message from God, he offers no rational proof for his prophetic mission but simply confronts people with the word he claims to have received from God. Some believe him and some do not. When Jesus preached and healed in Galilee, some believed that he was the one to whom the whole direction of Biblical revelation had been moving, that he embodied the message God had prepared from all eternity. Others demanded a sign. Jesus refused to give any sign to his “unbelieving generation” except “the sign of Jonah,” which was no sign at all, simply the prophetic word addressed to the Ninevites, who were free to accept or reject the word so long as they realized the consequences of their choice.

When Muhammad, in preaching to the Quraysh, claimed to bear the definitive, complete, and universal message from God, some believed, but also from him doubters were constantly demanding “signs” and “proofs.” Any miracle would do. If he were to make a spring gush forth from the earth, a well watered stand of palm trees, a piece of heaven fall from the sky, an angel to vouch for his words, a house of gold, or he himself ascend into heaven (Qur’an 17: 90-93), they would believe. The Qur’an responds that Muhammad is not a miracle-worker but simply a man with a message from God and goes on to note that miraculous signs never produced faith in the peoples to whom the earlier prophets were sent. Moreover, signs are lying all around in the Arabian desert, Muhammad tells them, - Ad, Thamud, and the other unrepentant civilizations destroyed because when they refused to accept the prophetic word. More signs are to be found in the eternal Book, in the stories of Noah and the people of his time, Moses and Pharaoh, Mary and her unbelieving kinsfolk. Yet other signs are found in nature, in the sun and moon, in mountains, seas, and animals. Beyond these, Muhammad could produce no logical proof for his unbelieving generation beyond the clearly announced prophetic message.

In the cases of both Jesus and Muhammad, God produced a grace-filled moment in the lives of their hearers with an invitation to faith. Those who accepted and believed the prophetic word made an act of faith, and only subsequently sought to comprehend the nature of God, read the facts of their personal and societal lives, and interpret the sweep of human history according to that faith. This not mean that all those who were not convinced were in bad faith. The New Testament does not condemn the sagacious “wait and see” attitude of the Jewish scholar Gamaliel, nor does the Islamic tradition condemn Abu Talib, the righteous uncle of Muhammad who always defended his nephew but died without entering Islam.

For Christians, the central event of the history of revelation occurred in God’s communication of the eternal Word or Message in the person of Jesus Christ, an assertion that, should a Muslim accept it, that Muslim should in conscience become a Christian. For Muslims, God’s greatest blessing and guidance to humankind occurred in the final and perfect revelation of the Qur’ân through the messengership of Muhammad, an affirmation which, were a Christian to accept it, he or she should conscientiously enter Islam.

Acceptance of each other’s prophets is not a matter of interreligious courtesy, for the concept of prophecy is constitutive of the very essence of each religion. Easy and watered-down solutions are no contribution to dialogue and, moreover, fail to satisfy the partner. For Christians to admit that Muhammad was “a kind of prophet” similar, perhaps, to Amos or John the Baptist, will not impress Muslims and is likely to be rejected as condescension. Similarly, for Muslims to expect that Christians will be gratified to learn that Jesus is highly respected as one of the messengers who preceded the perfect and final revelation brought by Muhammad is to misunderstand the essence of Christian faith.

I suggest that this impasse, which cannot be resolved by human logic, must be left to God, rather than worried and exacerbated in polemical confrontation. To paraphrase Qur’anic teaching, “to God we are all returning” and soon enough we will learn the answers to those matters over which we have disputed. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, discussions in Islamic texts commonly conclude with the words Allahu a'lam, “God is more knowledgeable.” This principle, which both religions are ready to accept within the context of our own faith communities, needs to be mutually acknowledged as well in dialogue on the vexed question of prophethood.

     3. THE DIVINE WORD AND SCRIPTURE IN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY

In the previous chapter, we looked at the question of prophethood as raised in the 12^th century work of the Christian Paul of Antioch and in the 14^th century response of the Muslim Ibn Taymiyya. The Christian admitted that Muhammad could be considered a prophet to the pagan Arabs but denied the universal nature of his prophethood. In response, the Muslim argued that the Qur’ân affirmed that Muhammad was sent as messenger to the whole of humankind.

Paul of Antioch then turns to his second point, that is, that Qur’ânic praise for and acceptance of the central elements of Christian faith is an acknowledgment by the Islamic Scripture that Christians must continue to follow the religion conveyed to them by Christ. He cites Qur’anic passages which praise Jesus and Mary, monasteries and churches, the apostles of Jesus, the Christian Scriptures, the friendship between Muhammad and his Christian contemporaries, and the Christian liturgy. In the Qur’ân, he states, Christians are distinguished from the inimical Jews and pagans and commanded to follow the Gospel which they possess.

     The status of the apostles of Jesus

Central to his argument is his contention that the Qur’ân confirms the textual soundness of the Christian Scripture and rejects the possibility that the Bible had undergone corruption. The Gospels were produced by the apostles (rasûl, pl. rusul) of Jesus, who are praised in the Qur’an (3:52, 5:111-112) as God’s helpers (ansâr’ullah), believers in God (âmannâ bi’llah) and Muslims (muslimûn). Just as Jesus’ faithful disciples who produced the Christian Scriptures could not have been in error, so also, he argues, the Qur’an presumes and affirms the soundness of the Scriptures at the time of the Qur’anic revelation in the 7^th century of the Christian era. Since that time, with Christians spread throughout the earth, possessing the Bible in many different languages, how, asks the bishop, could any textual corruption have taken place since the time of Muhammad?

In formulating his response, Ibn Taymiyya realizes the full implications of an assertion which is stated but not elaborated by Paul of Antioch, that is, that Christians never claim the Gospel to have been written by Christ, but rather by his disciples. By identifying these disciples as the messengers of God (rusul), the bishop is claiming for the Gospel authors an inerrancy indisputable from an Islamic point of view. Thus, Ibn Taymiyya begins by presenting a detailed examination of the prophetic or non-prophetic status of the apostles of Jesus.

A key element in this discussion is the ambiguity of the Arabic word rasûl/rusul. In Arab Christian terminology, the term is until today commonly used to designate the twelve apostles. However, in the Qur’ân, the term is equivalent to nabi and indicates one who brings divine revelation from God, but Christians never claim the status of nabi or prophet for Christ’s apostles. The Qur’anic term for Jesus’ apostles is hawariyyûn, adopted from the terminology of Ethiopian Christians.

     The Gospels as khabar

Ibn Taymiyya’s argument runs as follows. Christians do not claim a unitary Gospel, brought by Christ, but rather possess four gospels written by individuals for whom they do not claim the status of nabi, that is, prophet. Moreover, he adds, Christians admit that two of the evangelists, Mark and Luke, were not among the twelve apostles and perhaps did not even know Christ personally. Only that which has been handed down from God by a prophet can be known to be revealed, and thus only those statements of Christ which can be attested by successive transmission of textual fidelity to contain the literal teaching of Jesus can be said to express the revealed Gospel.

For Ibn Taymiyya, the four gospels are of the same status as Muslim collections of hadîth reports from Muhammad which, although they contain true statements and teaching of Muhammad, may differ verbally from one report to another and may also contain erroneous material. They must be treated as khabar, that is, information said to be from a prophet. Khabar is a neutral term indicating information which may be correct, or else basically sound but verbally inaccurate, or even wholly fabricated. The Islamic hadîth collections present countless examples of information of all three types.

In viewing the Christian Scriptures as khabar, Ibn Taymiyya holds that the gospels cannot be treated as a whole. They are neither to be rejected outright as fraudulent corruptions, nor to be accepted as books wholly revealed through the agency of a prophet. Just as Muslims must treat every prophetic logion alleged to be from Muhammad which is found in the collected hadîth on its own merits, so also every passage in the Gospels must be subjected to the same exacting criteria which Muslims apply to khabar (information) from Muhammad. Before being accepted as having been accurately handed down from the prophet, and thus ultimately from God, a hadîth report must be tested for the soundness of its material (matn) and the reliable and unbroken nature of its chain of transmission (isnâd). Christians, in addition, must fulfill another criterion, that is, to show that the translation of the prophetic report from its original language has been accurate.

Thus, a Muslim cannot affirm the soundness of the four gospels as wholly revealed books. On the other hand, neither can the possibility be denied that an individual passage might contain the actual message of God handed down from the prophet Jesus. Muslims cannot dismiss the Christian scriptures as a whole, for the likelihood is that most of what they contain is actually the divine prophetic message handed down in uncorrupted form. In the view of Ibn Taymiyya, which he admits is simply a personal opinion that other Muslim scholars might challenge, that which has been either accidentally changed or intentionally corrupted is, in all likelihood, relatively slight. (45) 

     The question of tahrîf

With this, Ibn Taymiyya enters into one of the most heatedly contested issues of Muslim-Christian polemic, that of, tahrîf or corruption of the Scriptures. Derived from the Arabic word harf, meaning “word,” the term indicates “to change wording” or “to change the original text.” Muslim polemicists used the term interchangeably with the Arabic tabdîl (to replace) and taghyîr, simply, “to change.”

The issue arose very early in Muslim-Christian debates, probably in response to the Christian allegation that the Gospels carry no mention of Jesus’ predicting the coming of ahmad/Ahmad, “the One most highly praised,” whom Muslims identify with Muhammad and whose advent is stated in the Qur’ân to have been announced by Jesus. Modern studies ⁽⁴⁶⁾  aimed at identifying the Qur’anic reference with the Greek form of Paraclete mentioned in John’s Gospel raise intriguing possibilities but have produced no definitive conclusions. The point is that Christians denied any reference to Ahmad by Jesus in the Gospels, and their Muslim interlocutors responded by contending that the reference was originally in the Gospel text but later removed.

There is a Qur’anic basis for the accusation of tahrîf, but its intent is somewhat different from the way the term came to be used in later debates. The accusation is made four times in the Qur’an that the Jews misinterpreted their own Scriptures, and the verbal form of tahrîf is used to indicate this erroneous interpretation. A distinction thus had to be made in the polemical tradition between tahrîf al-ma’na and tahrîf al-lafz. The former refers to misconstruing basically sound texts, (i.e, “changing the original meaning”) and the latter to corruption of the text itself (i.e., “changing the original wording.”) There is what one could call a consensus among Muslim scholars that, based on Qur’anic and hadîth assertions, Jews and Christians have misread and misinterpreted their Sacred Books, that is, that tahrîf al-ma’na has occurred. On tahrîf al-lafz, or verbal corruption, there is no consensus. As on other matters on which there is no ijmâ’ or consensus among the scholars, a wide range of opinion has been expressed by Muslim scholars.

The most extreme position favoring widespread textual corruption of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures is made by Ibn Hazm, who concluded that the Jewish rabbis and Christian clergy willfully changed and rewrote the Scriptural text to such an extent that the original revealed text can no longer be discovered in the Bible ⁽⁴⁷⁾ . At the other end of the spectrum are the views of Ash’arite scholars like Al-Ghazâli, Al-Baqillâni, and Fakhr al-Dîn al-Râzi ⁽⁴⁸⁾  who, while positing widespread misinterpretation, basically accepted the textual soundness of Christian Scriptures.

Ibn Taymiyya’s treatment of the question of tahrîf is the most carefully nuanced that I have found in the history of Muslim polemic against Christianity. His view differs, at one pole, from the position of widespread corruption made by Ibn Hazm and, at the other extreme, one of basic acceptance of the text as exemplified by Al-Ghazâli. Ibn Taymiyya holds a Muslim can neither deny the possibility that an individual passage may contain the actual message of God handed down through the prophet Jesus nor affirm that no textual corruption has occurred in the Christian Scriptures.

His aim is not to demonstrate that textual corruption actually occurred in the Biblical texts, still less to single out instances of this, but rather to define the limits of Islamic knowledge on the matter. Nowhere in the Qur’ân or sunna, he holds, is it ever denied that textual corruption might or could have taken place. Anything beyond that is a matter on which different opinions among Muslims are permissible. The matter is ultimately unknowable and a Muslim cannot presume to decide one way or the other.

In taking this position, he refers to a well-known statement of ‘Umar ibn al-Khattâb, the third calif: “When ‘Umar saw Ka’b al-Ahbâr holding a copy of the Torah, he said, ‘Ka’b, if you know that this is the Torah which God handed down to Moses, then read it.’” Ibn Taymiyya continues: “The issue is thus conditional on what we can in no way know. ‘Umar did not decisively determine that the texts had been corrupted when he did not put confidence in everything that was in them.” He thus rejects the view of Paul of Antioch that the Qur’ân positively affirms the textual soundness of the Biblical text, while holding that Muslim scholars who have, like Ibn Hazm, pronounced negatively on the textual soundness of the Bible, as well as those who, like Al-Ghazâli, judged the Bible to be textually sound, have gone beyond what is taught in the Qur’an and sunna and are merely expressing personal opinions.

     Biblical corruption before and after the time of Muhammad

If the Biblical text had been corrupted, when did the corruption take place? Did the corruption take place at the time of Jesus, by the apostles, during the intervening centuries before Muhammad, or after the time of Muhammad? Muslims recognize the prophethood of Jesus, so any teachings he brought from God must be accepted as inerrant. The Qur’ân also portrays the disciples of Jesus as upright believers who surrendered their lives to God. This would indicate that they faithfully transmitted the teaching of Jesus. However, since there are no solid grounds in the Qur’ân or hadîth for considering the apostles as prophets, they cannot be considered inerrant. Thus, the possibility of inadvertent verbal inaccuracy cannot be precluded.

Paul of Antioch’s assertion, however, was that the Qur’ân testifies to the soundness of the Biblical text in use among Christians in the time of Muhammad. He argues from the Qur’anic passage, “We have bestowed on him [Jesus] the Gospel...Let the People of the Gospel judge (wal-yahkum) by what God has revealed in it” (5:46-47). The Biblical text which Christians possessed at the time of the Qur’anic revelation must have been sound, he contends, otherwise Christians would not have been commanded to judge by what God revealed in it. If the text was sound in Muhammad’s time, he continued, the text in the centuries following must also be considered sound, since by the period in which Muhammad lived the text had already been translated into many languages and was continually being read and studied by countless Christians. Thus, he held , it is inconceivable that any one could have introduced new textual changes after that time.

Some Muslim scholars, relying on an early variant, read the Qur’anic text as “We have bestowed on him the Gospel so that (wa-li-yahkum) the People of the Gospel judge by what God has revealed in it. Others interpret the text as meaning that Christians were commanded to judge by what was revealed in the original text of the Gospel up until the sending of Muhammad. Ibn Taymiyya dismisses these views as intellectual contortions and follows the view of the majority of Islamic scholars that the verse is to be read as a command to the Christians of the time of Muhammad. ⁽⁴⁹⁾  In the Qur’ân, God could not have been commanding those who had already died before the time of Muhammad, he states, so the command must have been directed at those Christians living at the time of Muhammad.

Ibn Taymiyya interprets the Qur’anic verse as saying that if Christians judge by what is already in their own Scriptures, they will be led to recognize and accept the prophethood of Muhammad. This does not mean that the Qur’an denies that any textual corruption has taken place. If the texts were basically sound, despite verbal inaccuracies, God’s judgment could still be found in them and Christians would still be commanded to accept the prophetic nature of Muhammad’s mission which, as we saw in the previous chapter, was universal in its extent.

He concludes that the question of textual corruption and its extent is ultimately irrelevant. While it cannot be conclusively determined whether or not Christians still possess the original text of their Scriptures, there is nevertheless no doubt that they have wrongly interpreted these Scriptures and changed the original teaching of Christ. Thus, while maintaining prudent skepticism on the matter of tahrîf al-lafz (textual corruption), Ibn Taymiyya follows the consensus of Muslim scholars in charging the Christians with tahrîf al-ma’na (misinterpretation and distortion of the original teaching).

     Innovation of beliefs and practices

In other words, he opposes Scripture and tradition, holding that if Christians would judge their later theological and liturgical innovations by their own Scriptural text, they would be forced to admit that much of their faith and practice had its origins, not in the teachings of the faithful prophet Jesus, but in Greco-Roman religion and philosophy. He states:
“The Christians constructed a religion from two religions - from the religion of the monotheist prophets, and from that of the idolaters. In their religion, they put some elements from what was brought by the prophets together with others that they adopted from the opinions and actions of the pagans. Thus, they innovated the terms of the hypostases, although these terms were not found anywhere in the message of the prophets. Similarly, they introduced painted idols in place of corporeal idols [i.e., icons in place of pagan statues], prayers to them instead of praying to the sun, moon, and stars, and fasting in the spring in order to combine revealed religion and the cycle of nature.” ⁽⁵⁰⁾ 

The crux of his argument against Christianity is not that Christians had changed the Scriptures but that they had changed the Scriptural religion. Relying mainly on the Christian bishop Eutychius (Sa’îd ibn Bitrîq)’s ecclesiastical history, the Annals (in Arabic, Nazm al-Jawhar), Ibn Taymiyya traces the various innovations in belief and practice that occurred early Christian history, such as the story of Helena and the cross of Christ, the Church of St. Michael in Alexandria, prayer to the East, permission of pork, monasticism, abandonment of circumcision, omission of ritual purification, the theological controversies surrounding Arius and Nestorius, and most particularly, the decrees of the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon. ⁽⁵¹⁾ 

Ibn Taymiyya’s interest in all this was not so much that of a polemical observer as that of a concerned participant. In his view, the Christian replacement of the divine religion revealed by the prophets with a man-made substitute clearly paralleled what he observed happening in the Islamic community of his time. In the cult of tomb veneration and the practices which centered about the shrines of Islamic saints, the personality cults of living and dead Sufis, the preoccupation with miracles, dreams and preternatural gifts, and practices like sung and danced dhikr for which there was no basis in the sunna, he saw analogies with the ways which Christians had, in the course of time, corrupted the original practices taught by Jesus. ⁽⁵²⁾  In the theological speculations of Mu’tazili and Ash’arite theologians and their innovation of intellectual concepts and terminology not found in the Qur’an and sunna, he saw Muslims following the same path that Christians had trod in producing creeds and theological formulations which were not grounded in Scripture. ⁽⁵³⁾  Some Muslims, such as the philosophers like Al-Farâbi and Ibn Sîna or the wahdat al-wujûd school of Sufism, Ibn Taymiyya accused of going even farther astray in their innovated views than had the Christians. ⁽⁵⁴⁾  He hoped that by pointing out exactly how the Christians had gone astray, Muslims would desist from following similar paths into error.

     Considering the Islamic critique of Christian Scriptures

Reading Ibn Taymiyya’s line of argument today, it appears that he anticipated some of the findings of the historical-critical studies of the Bible of the past two centuries as well as many of the objections raised to traditional Christianity at the time of the Reformation. However, in evaluating the interchange between Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya, Christians today find themselves at a conceptual distance from both. It is clear that the Christian understanding of Biblical inspiration has moved away from the literal, even mechanistic, understanding shared by Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya. The Christian understanding of the Biblical text, its authorship and inspiration, has been irreversibly influenced and shaped by the historical-critical studies on the Bible undertaken in the past two centuries. The fact that during the same period Islamic interpretation of the Qur’ân has moved in a different direction makes discussion of revelation and Scripture difficult.

Christian scholars today are less interested in rediscovering the ipsissima verba and ipsissima facta of Jesus than in determining the ipsissima intentio of the Biblical authors. The “search for the historical Jesus” has proved to be a dead end, and efforts to determine the original wording of Jesus’ evangelical logia, the most recent attempt being that of the highly publicized Jesus Seminar, must be seen as an interesting exercise in historical reconstruction but one which can produce nothing beyond scholarly conjecture.

Christian Biblical scholarship has come to realize that the Scriptures are the product of the Church. It was the early Christian communities that orally preserved the message of Jesus in the crucial period before the communities had any Scriptures beyond the Septuagint. Moreover, it is clear that the communities did not consider the preservation of the ipsissima verba of Jesus in their original articulation to be an essential element of the message they intended to communicate. One need only look at the verbal variations in passages of fundamental importance for Christian faith, such as the quite different versions of the Lord’s Prayer found in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, or the words of Eucharistic institution at the Last Supper as reported in the three Synoptic Gospels and in Paul’s account in First Corinthians - none of which contain identical wording - to see that the preservation of the original words of Jesus was not one of the concerns of the early communities of disciples.

Moreover, as communities convinced that they were being guided by Christ’s own Spirit, they did not hesitate to rework and even change the words of Jesus to fit the needs of the specific communities. When the oral traditions which had been gathered in early collections such as the proto-Markan and Q sources came to be written down in Gospel form, the evangelists’ intention was not to communicate the very words of Jesus, which in some cases had already been lost, but to proclaim and communicate the faith of the community in the risen Lord.

The Bible is the product of the Church in a second important sense. It is the Church which has determined canonicity in deciding which books of the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament writings are to be considered part of the canonical collection. Until about the year 100, when the Christian communities cited “Scripture,” they were referring to the Jewish Scriptures, usually in the Septuagint translation. Moreover, when Christians began to make collections of specifically Christian writings, mainly for liturgical recitation, they did not consider the four Gospels to be more inspired than, for example, the Pauline Epistles. Thus, the early collection of Marcion about 150 A.D., while rejecting the Hebrew Scriptures, consisted of the Gospel of Luke and ten Epistles as the basis of his theology. It would be another hundred years before the final New Testament canon of four Gospels, Acts, twenty Epistles, and Apocalypse was universally accepted.

In reviewing these generally accepted points of New Testament scholarship, already well-known to most readers, my purpose is to show that in dialogue with Muslims today, the Christian understanding of our Scriptures has moved far both from the ideas defended by Paul of Antioch as well as from the mainstream of Islamic teaching on questions of prophetic revelation and Scripture. This awareness compels modern Muslims and Christians to reformulate the issues of Scripture and revelation. I propose the following as bases for Muslim-Christian discourse:

1. Christians today recognize that it was the apostolic Church that produced the Scriptures. The New Testament writings are not considered to be verbally inspired oracles of Divine speech delivered through the agency of a delimited number of prophets. However, by Muslims, the Qur’ân is held to be the literal message of God delivered through the agency of the prophet Muhammad. They tend to find it a scandalous symptom of post-Enlightenment rationalist decadence that Christians might even admit the possibility that the divine words brought by the prophet Jesus have been revised by his disciples.

2. The apostolic communities that produced the New Testament were convinced that the Holy Spirit was guiding them to express their faith in what God had accomplished in Jesus Christ and what the Spirit was continuing to effect in their lives. Their concern was less to preserve the original words of Jesus than the enduring divine message embodied in the person of Christ. Muslims, on the other hand, are equally convinced that the Islamic community, and even the prophet Muhammad himself, had no role in the production or authorship of the Qur’anic message, which they hold to be God’s own words delivered to humankind through the final prophet.

3. The Christian tradition has been unanimous in holding the Biblical Books to be “equally inspired by God” and occasional efforts by individual Christians to consider some writings, such as the Four Gospels (or one of the Four), to be of a higher grade of inspiration than others have been consistently rejected. This is despite historical disagreements among the Churches concerning the canonical list of Biblical books. The Islamic tradition has never defined which book or books are intended by the Qur’anic references to Torah and Injîl (Gospel), but generally presumes there to have been one original book given respectively to Moses and Jesus, which alone can be considered to have been revealed by God. Consequently, Muslims and Christians, when they discuss the Injîl or Gospel, are not referring to the same textual material. Muslims have in mind the unitary Gospel which they believe that God handed down to Jesus, whereas Christians think, in addition to the Old or First Testament of the Jews, of their proper Scriptures as being the 26 books of the New Testament which have been accepted as canonical by the apostolic Church.

4. The liberty with which the apostolic community developed its Scriptures from oral tradition to written documents is based on a specifically Christian concept of revelation. Christian faith is founded on a person, not a book. Christians hold that God revealed God’s own self in the person of Jesus Christ. The Christian Scriptures do not contain the literal Word of God but rather announce, bear witness to and point toward God’s self-revelation in Christ. Thus, although Christians are called, on Qur’anic authority, “People of the Book” by Muslims, Christian self-understanding denies that Christianity is a “religion of the Book” in the way that Islam holds itself to be. For Muslims, it is the divine Word revealed in the Qur’ân that forms them into a community (umma). Similarly, the frequent usage by non-Muslims of the term “Mohammedans” to indicate the followers of Islam violates Islamic self-understanding, for Islam is founded not on a man but on a message contained in a revealed Book.

5. For Christians, their faith is based on a continuity with the faith of the apostles in the person of Christ whom God raised from the dead, and their New Testament Scriptures are the normative witnesses to this faith. Christian faith stands or falls on the question whether the apostolic communities properly understood the message of Jesus and faithfully transmitted, under the guidance of the Spirit, their experience of the risen Christ. Thus, it is both essential and logically consistent for Christians to seek to determine, through historical and critical studies, the original content of that message and the original intention of the apostolic communities that produced those testimonies.

By contrast, in affirming a faith grounded in the divinely-revealed text of the Qur’ân, Muslims are adverse to critical scholarship which would seek to determine human authorship, sources, or historical development in the Qur’ân. Thus, while Muslims tend to view Christian historical-critical studies of the Bible as evidence of the human origins of Christian Scripture, that it was not divinely revealed through a prophet, Christians tend to regard Muslim rejection of such studies as applied to the Qur’ân as an indication of a non-scientific, pre-modern approach to Scripture.

     The Debate between Ibn Taymiyya and Paul of Antioch

In my opinion, Ibn Taymiyya had the better of the argument with Paul of Antioch. In debate, the Christian, constrained by a literalist theology of revelation, set himself an impossible task in trying to prove the Christian Scriptures could have undergone no verbal change since the time of Jesus. Ibn Taymiyya saw more clearly the problems involved in asserting that one or more Gospels contained the literal words of Jesus.

What neither of the partners in the debate seemed to consider was whether the sole purpose of Scripture was in fact simply to convey oracular utterances from God. Scripture has other purposes, such as the proclamation of good news of a divine redemptive act, the spiritual formation of disciples, the establishment of moral values, the communication of an enduring message, the edification of believers, and the consolation of the afflicted - none of which requires a precise replication of prophetic speech. In trying to prove that Christian Scriptures fulfilled an Islamic criterion of revelation, which is not that of Christian faith, Paul of Antioch gave the game away before it began. That this is not purely a medieval phenomenon can be seen in the results of contemporary polemical debates between Muslim apologists like Ahmad Deedat and various Christian evangelists who share with him a literalist view of Scriptural revelation.

     Transmission of the Qur’ân

Christians, however, might be permitted to wonder whether the conviction with which Muslims affirm the pristine nature of the Qur’anic text is all that different from the confidence which Christians place in the faithful transmission of the message of Christ by New Testament authors. Does the Qur’anic text in the hands of scholars and ordinary believers today represent a complete and accurate replica of the divine revelations granted in the 7^th Century to Muhammad? Muslims are convinced that it does, and the affirmation of the Qur’an as the literal word of God is a cardinal principle of Islamic faith. At the same time, it must be said that it takes a certain amount of good will for the non-Muslim to uncritically affirm this position. One does not have to posit a radical reconstruction of the type proposed by Wansborough and his school ⁽⁵⁵⁾  to ask whether the process of the reception of their Scripture by Muslims is so much more transparent than what occurred in the Christian community.

Muslim scholars over the centuries have debated as to whether or not Muhammad was illiterate, and the issue turns on the precise meaning of the Qur’anic term ummi. It could mean someone who could not read or write, which would not have been unusual for a person living in the Arabian peninsula in the 7^th Century, or it could indicate an Arab who could not read or write any language other than Arabic. One strong current of the Islamic tradition has held that the illiteracy of Muhammad is evidence for the miraculous nature of the Qur’ân.

Whatever one’s opinion concerning the ability of Muhammad to write, Muslim scholars are virtually unanimous in asserting that Muhammad did not write down the revelations coming to him from God. According to traditional Islamic belief, Muhammad received verbal revelations, which he memorized and taught orally to his Companions in the course of the 22 years of his prophetic ministry. As Muhammad aged and it became clear to the Companions that he would not be with them forever, some Companions began to write down the memorized verses on whatever primitive writing materials were available in Central Arabia. The amount of the Qur’ân which Muslim scribes had committed to writing on papyrus, stones, hides, bark, bones, etc. before the death of Muhammad is disputed, with some scholars claiming, on not very convincing historical evidence, that the whole of the Qur’ân was written down before the death of Muhammad.

According to the traditional accounts, a first compilation of revealed verses was made in the time of Abu Bakr in the second year after the death of Muhammad. Because so many of the Qur’ân reciters who had memorized much of the Qur’ân were killed at the battle of Yamâma, Zaid ibn Thabit was summoned by Abu Bakr who, in the presence of ‘Umar, ordered Zaid to collect the existing fragments into a volume. ⁽⁵⁶⁾  “How could I do a thing,” answered Zaid, “which the Messenger of God had not done?” Zaid’s response is interesting in that it confirms that the Qur’anic revelations had not been codified in the time of Muhammad and implies that such a compilation might have been regarded as bid’ah (unwarranted innovation) by some members of the early Islamic community. The tradition records that Zaid collected the fragments into a “volume” which remained in the possession of Abu Bakr until his death and was then passed on to ‘Umar who in turn gave it to his daughter Hafsa.

It was ‘Uthmân, the third calif, who ordered a second recension which is generally accepted as the basic text of the Qur’ân today. The traditions that record this process are confusing and contradictory, some holding that ‘Uthmân basically accepted and promulgated Hafsa’s collection, others maintaining that he began anew the process of collecting fragments, bringing together Companions and Qur’ân-reciters who made a new arrangement of the fragments. On completion of the work of the redaction team, the previously existing fragments were then destroyed.

However, it took some time before ‘Uthmân’s recension became universally accepted by the umma. Later reports contend that some verses which had existed in destroyed codices belonging to various Companions and which were still being recited in worship had been omitted in the Uthmanic recension. The best known claim concerns the famous verse recommending the stoning of adulterers. Among the many examples of textual questioning, I mention only two. “Hamîda bint Abi Yûnus said, ‘My father recited to me when he was 80 years old from A’isha’s mushaf (volume)...That was before Uthmân changed (yughayyir) the codices.” Zirr ibn Hubaysh said, “[The Surat al-Ahzâb] used to be the same length as Surat al-Baqara and as part of it we used to recite ‘the stoning verse.’” This would be a startling charge, since the Surat al-Baqara is the longest Sura in the Uthmanic recension in use today, five times the length of the existent Surat al-Ahzâb.

Granted that, as Burton has shown, many - and conceivably, all - of these reports are fabrications in order to find a Qur’anic basis for legal judgments ⁽⁵⁷⁾ , nevertheless, they indicate that in earlier centuries textual questions were raised by pious Muslim scholars that would be shocking to the sensibilities of modern Muslims. A’isha, for example is reported to have explained the loss of some Qur’anic verses as follows: “The stoning verse and the verse about the ten nursings had been revealed and they were on a page under my bed at the time the Prophet was dying. When he died and we were occupied in attending to him, a domestic animal belonging to the household got in and ate that page.” In another report, when Uthmân’s team of experts were involved in preparing their recension, they sought the original recension in Hafsa’s possession only to discover that it had been destroyed by worms and was hence unreadable.

That this material, which I admit may be quite offensive to modern Muslims, was reported without shame by earlier generations of Muslim scholars, is an indication of the fact that for the first centuries of Islam, the authentic Qur’ân was that preserved in human memory rather than on the pages of a book. A characteristic of oral cultures is that memory is the criterion by which written texts are judged and verified. If what is written agrees with what has been memorized, it can be considered correct. In literary cultures, the process is reversed. An actor who has memorized a Shakespearean soliloquy checks his memory against the script.

My point is that, just as Christian faith stands or falls on whether the apostolic Church faithfully understood and communicated the Good News of the crucified and risen Christ, so also Islam stands or falls on whether the huffâz whose memories were the criterion against which the Uthmanic recension was verified were accurate and comprehensive in their recollection of the Qur’anic revelations.

Although Christians do not claim infallibility or prophethood for the apostolic communities that produced the New Testament, they believe that these communities were guided by the Spirit in communicating their experience of the crucified and risen Christ. One might define Christians as that group of believers who trust that the disciples of Jesus had an experience of the risen Christ and faithfully handed on that good news.

Just as Christians have confidence in the Spirit’s guidance of the apostolic communities so that the Scriptures that they produced can be trusted to convey a credible account of the meaning of the life, death and resurrection of Christ, so also Muslims place their faith in the memories of the huffâz among the Companions. Although they do not claim prophethood for these huffâz, they believe that these early Companions, whose names and capabilities are often lost to history, were preserved from error by Jibrîl (Gabriel), who is identified with the Holy Spirit, from erring in their preservation of the Qur’anic revelations.

Once, in a question-answer period after a conference to Muslim university students, I was asked: “How can you place confidence in Scriptures whose early codices contain so many variants?” I answered that actually we are happy to have these early codices, for our scholars can study and compare them scientifically and offer their informed opinions on the more probable reading. As new manuscripts and fragments continue to be found and scrutinized and the scientific study of the manuscript traditions continues to grow in precision and sophistication, one can confidently claim that through ongoing scholarship, the churches are approaching a knowledge of the original Biblical texts to an extent that was impossible in pre-modern times.

By contrast, the pre-Uthmanic fragments of Qur’ân revelations have been destroyed and are lost to history. One must “take it or leave it”. Either one accepts that the huffâz were accurate and comprehensive in correcting the pre-Uthmanic fragments, or one doubts that. The few Qur’ânic variants found in Ibn Sa’d and other early writers cannot be checked against preserved fragments.

I am not saying that the early huffâz were inaccurate in their memories nor that the Uthmanic recension of the Qur’ân is not the complete and authentic collection of revelations delivered by God directly to Muhammad. It is quite possible that the Qur’anic text which we have today is a faithful record of what Muhammad communicated to his Companions, but it takes something of a “leap of faith” to conclude that all possibility of inadvertent error must be precluded.

Christians believe that the early disciples of Jesus “got it right,” so to speak, in understanding correctly and communicating accurately their experience of the risen Christ, but they cannot prove the validity of this conviction to others. Similarly, Muslims are convinced that all those involved in the process of producing the Qur’anic volume - those who wrote down Qur’anic verses, those who later collated the texts and compared them to what had been memorized by the huffâz and on this basis drew up the ‘Uthmanic recension and who then destroyed the variants - that all these were preserved from error, but they might find it difficult to convince others of this. With regard to an affirmation of the Qur’anic Scripture, the Christian can do no more than repeat the prudent reticence of Ibn Taymiyya:
“The issue is conditional on what we can in no way know. We do not decisively determine that the texts had been corrupted when we do not put confidence in everything that was in them.”

     4. GOD’S UNITY AND TRINITY: THE ISLAMIC-CHRISTIAN DEBATE

In the previous chapters, we have examined the first two points raised in the debate between the 12^th century Christian bishop, Paul of Antioch, and the 14^th century Muslim thinker, Ibn Taymiyya. To the Christian’s claim that Christians, even if accepting the prophethood of Muhammad to the Arabs, find no Qur’anic basis for considering that he was sent to them, the Muslim answers that Muhammad’s prophethood and the message he brought are universal. To the Christian’s claim that the Qur’an affirms the Christian Scriptures and denies the possibility that change could have occurred, the Muslim answers that no single judgment can be passed on the soundness of Christian Scriptures, but that each passage must be treated individually in order to determine its divine provenance according to the principles for judging information alleged to be from a prophet.

Here we take up the third question debated by the two medieval authors, that of God’s unity and whether the Trinitarian nature of Christian belief is compatible with that unity. This subject, which cannot be avoided in Christian-Muslim controversial literature, would seem to offer little room for originality. The general direction of the debate is predictable; one can presume that the Christian will affirm belief in one God alone and that the Muslim will claim that belief in the Trinity is shirk, the association of created beings in the divine Oneness.

     Paul of Antioch’s defence of Trinitarian doctrine

Paul of Antioch’s treatment of this issue is perhaps his least original, relying heavily on the Christian Arab theological tradition since the time of Yahya ibn ‘Adi, yet his Trinitarian argument takes up almost half his short treatise. A textual problem should be noted. In the two centuries which intervened between Paul’s original treatise and Ibn Taymiyya’s response, Paul’s letter was widely distributed among Christians, often recopied, commented upon, and revised, with new arguments continually being added to the original text. ⁽⁵⁸⁾  The text which Ibn Taymiyya received and refuted in the early 14^th Century was in fact an augmented version of Paul of Antioch’s treatise which contained many Biblical “proof texts” in support of the Trinitarian nature of God. The later additions to Paul of Antioch’s text used terms and raised arguments that Paul sometimes went out of his way to avoid, so that the text to which Ibn Taymiyya responded was on key issues less consistent, hence less convincing, than the original.

Paul of Antioch’s approach is to minimize the differences between Christian and Islamic belief, affirming strongly God’s unity and interpreting the Trinity in light of Muslim sensibilities. He claims, somewhat ingenuously, that if Muslims were to understand correctly the Christian belief in the Trinity, they would find nothing objectionable in it. ⁽⁵⁹⁾  In professing faith in the triune God, Christians are merely affirming that the One God is an existing being (shay’), who speaks (nâtiq) and lives (hayy). He avoids the traditional Arab Christian term uqnûm which might imply distinct individuals or “persons” and instead employs the theologically neutral term ism, “name.”

In referring to the one God with three names, Paul is entering into an internal debate hotly contested by Muslim scholars of his time. All Muslims agree that God has many names, of which the 99 most beautiful names (al-asmâ al-husnâ) mentioned in the Qur’ân are well-known. Each name describes one of God’s attributes (sifât). The nature of the attributes was a celebrated matter of controversy debated by the two most important theological schools in medieval Islam, the Mu’tazila and the Ash’arites. On this, as on other issues controverted by the two schools, Ash’arite formulations generally came to be accepted as orthodox by Sunni Muslims, while the Shi’a have tended to maintain Muta’zili positions.

To the Mu’tazila, God’s names and the attributes they describe are mere appellations which we humans apply to God, who is in essence beyond all names, attributes, and other human concepts and categories. The Ash’arite tradition, conversely, held that God’s names and attributes are real and truly subsist in God’s nature independently of human reason. Paul of Antioch allies himself with the Ash’arite position, claiming that of God’s many names and attributes, three are constitutive of God’s essence: that is, being, speech, and life. The names by which Christians refer to God - Father, Son, and Spirit - indicate and describe God’s three essential attributes (al-sifât al-jawhariyya).

He claims that these names (“the One who is, speaks, lives”) for God are not inventions which have been innovated by Christians, but derive from clear Gospel teaching. Here it must be remembered that Paul has previously shown to his satisfaction that the Qur’ân accepts the veracity of the Christian Scriptures. To demonstrate that the Christian teaching is not a departure from the prophetic tradition, he offers citations from the Hebrew Scriptures and the Qur’ân which use the same names for God. This is an argument tailored to the position of his Muslim interlocutors, since according to Islam, the religion of the prophets is one.

     Ibn Taymiyya’s response

In response to these assertions, Ibn Taymiyya penned a 320-page response in which he presented a critique of every aspect of Trinitarian theology from an Islamic perspective. The basis on which he rejects the Christian view is to present Trinitarian dogma as anomalous within the consistent tradition of prophetic teaching, a deviation from that one tradition which alone conveys revealed information about God’s nature. The Christians, he claims, cannot find in the explicit teaching of any of the prophets or any valid interpretation of prophetic messages a valid basis for the Christian belief. Rather, he asserts, they have founded the doctrine on ambiguous expressions in the Bible and then supported it with rational argumentation which is both unconvincing and replete with internal contradictions.

Ibn Taymiyya’s approach is a departure from the rationalist polemics of Muslim theologians which preceded him, of which he was quite critical. Both the Mu’tazili ‘Abd al-Jabbâr, in his Mughni ⁽⁶⁰⁾ , and the Ash’arite Al-Baqillâni, in the Tamhîd ⁽⁶¹⁾ , attempted a comprehensive refutation of Trinitarian doctrine on the basis of the arguments derived from philosophy and the principles of logic. To Ibn Taymiyya, such argumentation can have no more than ad hominem value and ultimately misses the point. The doctrine of the Trinity must finally be rejected, he holds, not on the basis of internal contradictions and principles of logical impossibility, but because the dogma represents a deviation antithetic to the clear and consistent current of prophetic revelation.

Thus he tries to show that the terminology of the Trinity - hypostases, fatherhood, sonship, divine and human natures in Christ, the Spirit, divine union, incarnation, indwelling and the like - has been used by Christians to bear meanings that could never have been intended by Christ or the earlier prophets. By contrast, he claims, the Qur’anic usage of these terms is congruent with the one religion of all the prophets. Thus, Ibn Taymiyya is positing a uniform Judaeo-Islamic tradition of prophetic monotheism from which, in his view, Christians have gone astray. Evidence of their divergence from the message of the prophets is their own disunity in formulating their innovated beliefs. He makes use of both Christian and Islamic sources to delineate the disparity and contradictions between Melkite, Nestorian, and Jacobite theologies.

Paul of Antioch argued from observation of the created universe, that being is more perfect than non-being, that one who speaks is more worthy than one who does not speak, and one who lives is of higher state than that which is not living. Hence God is to be conceived as possessing the most sublime names of being, speech, and life. In response, Ibn Taymiyya accuses the bishop of being disingenuous. The Christians have arrived at their belief in the Trinity, not from reflection on the nature of the universe, but rather from what they claim to have learned in their Scriptures. Thus, it is in the realm of prophetic teaching rather than in speculation derived from natural philosophy or metaphysics that the issue must be decided. Rational argumentation can play a useful but quite limited function in that by showing the unreasonableness of Christian explanations of the Trinity, one can assert that such a doctrine could never have been taught by the prophets.

He claims that Christians have diverged from prophetic religion in three ways: firstly, by innovating terms and concepts, such as uqnûm, that were never used by any of the prophets, including Jesus. Secondly, they have reached conclusions which are incompatible with the teaching of the prophets. He offers as example the doctrine of the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the person of Jesus, defended by Paul of Antioch as an intellectual rather than physical generation but which nevertheless, according to Ibn Taymiyya, demands potentiality and change in God. Thirdly, the Christians have given meanings to prophetic teaching which the words themselves cannot bear. To prove his point, he takes up each Biblical citation found in the Christian treatise to show that the critical words in each passage have been cited out of context or that they are applied in a novel and unjustifiable sense.

To be fair to Paul of Antioch, one must note that he himself sought to anticipate such accusations by avoiding the Arabic terms uqnûm and sifah for hypostasis and attribute, preferring the neutral but theologically rather impoverished term ism (name). These traditional terms, as well as the great number of Biblical citations challenged by Ibn Taymiyya, were added by later Christian redactors in order, in their view, to strengthen the argument, or to locate Paul’s arguments more firmly within the tradition of Christian Arabic theological usage.

Ibn Taymiyya grants that God is sometimes called “Father” in the Torah, the Psalms, and elsewhere in a figurative sense to indicate that God is the Creator who cares for humankind by providing sustenance, support, and guidance. Similarly, when prophets and others, such as the Jewish people, are called “God’s son,” it indicates the affectionate, “fatherly” care and guidance by which God provides for people. Thus, Jesus’ Gospel references to God as Father and to himself as God’s son, if such logia can be determined truly to derive from him, must be interpreted in the light of this consistent tradition. For phrases such as “Your Heavenly Father knows you need all these things,” “I am returning to my Father and your Father, my God and your God,” and “be children of your Heavenly Father,” Ibn Taymiyya holds that there is already a coherent exegetical pattern according to which these terms are to be understood. He claims that Christians follow this hermeneutical procedure in the case of everyone but Jesus, where they innovate entirely new meanings for the terms to bear. In this way, they break their own interpretative rules and make fatherhood and sonship into equivocal terms, even within the same passage, such as in their interpretation of the phrase “my Father and your Father.”

A unique feature of Ibn Taymiyya’s Trinitarian rebuttal, one which raises his discourse beyond the usual level of polemical debate, is his surprising assertion that many of the errors committed by Christians are paralleled by deviations committed by Muslims of earlier generations as well as his own contemporaries. In fact, much of his argumentation in Al-Jawâb al-Sahîh and elsewhere is directed against specific Muslims and Muslim movements which, according to Ibn Taymiyya, often go further astray in their teaching about God than what has been proposed by Christians.

Foremost among these deviations are the views of Sufi shaykhs, particularly those of the wahdat al-wujûd school of Ibn ‘Arabi, and manifestations of popular piety which center about tombs of Sufis and other holy persons. Just as Christians commit shirk, associating creatures with the One Creator, by holding that Christ is in substantial union with God or that God’s Spirit indwells in Christ, so also Sufis claim ittihâd (union with God) or hulûl (indwelling) for their shaykhs. At least, states Ibn Taymiyya, Christians are making these claims, excessive and deviant though they be, about a prophet, one of God’s holiest and most favored of humans, whereas the Sufis go to extremes in their assertions about ordinary, sinful humans. The proponents of wahdat al-wujûd, he holds, have gone beyond shirk into blatant kufr (unbelief) by identifying God existentially with all creation, making ittihâd and hulûl into universal properties of the whole created universe.

At the basis of their theological aberrations lies a psychological flaw which Christians share with deviant elements in the Islamic umma. Exaggerating the natural respect which people have for holy persons, they posit for them unwarranted associations with God, such as substantial union or divine indwelling. Their error consists of failing to maintain the distinctness and dissimilarity of God from all created beings. If Ibn Taymiyya tends to belabor the issue of associating creatures with the Godhead, it is because of the central importance he gives to tawhîd, that is, “asserting God’s oneness.” True tawhîd consists in affirming God’s nature and proper relationship to the created universe. Tawhîd rests on two pillars: the profession of God as Creator and obedience to God as Commander. In declaring God creator, one affirms the essential separateness and dissimilarity of God from any creature. In professing God Commander of the sharî’a, one maintains God’s religious and ethical connection with the universe.

These two key elements are central to all prophetic teaching. When one deviates from this strict prophetic message, the “Straight Path” mentioned in the Fâtiha, one goes astray in one of two directions: either toward tashbîh, which associates God with creatures, mixing and intermingling the Divine with the created, or toward ta’tîl, making God so distant that religiosity becomes dry and formal and that God’s commands become irrelevant in daily life. The first of these errors (tashbîh) is that committed by Christians, Sufis, and much popular religiosity, while the second tendency (ta’tîl) is that committed by philosophers, Jews, and by kalâm theologians of both Ash’arite and Mu’tazili schools. Against the human tendency to invent doctrines in accord with their whims, Ibn Taymiyya seeks to reaffirm the genuine tawhîd revealed through the prophets.

In this way, Ibn Taymiyya situates Christian Trinitarian doctrine within the broader history of sound and erroneous responses to the one religion brought by the prophets. The difference between the errors of the Christians and those committed by some Muslims, he holds, is that while many individual Muslims have gone astray in ways similar to the Christians, the Christians have institutionalized error by making it the proclaimed doctrine of their religion.

     Questions old and new

The debate between Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya continues to raise questions for Christians and Muslims concerned about the relationship between these two faiths. Is there a sense in which one can admit as valid Paul of Antioch’s seemingly naive assertion that if Muslims understood properly the Christian doctrine of the Trinitarian God that they would find in it nothing incompatible with true monotheism? Does the Qurân and the Islamic tradition formed by the Qur’anic revelation ever treat orthodox Christian belief in the Trinity? Can the Arab Christian theological tradition, developed in the context of an ongoing debate and dialogue with Muslims, be a corrective to European/Western theological formulations which evolved in a cultural context in which Islamic objections need not be taken into consideration? And - what is the perhaps the most difficult - has the defensive attitude adopted by Christians in dialogue of trying to convince Muslims that they really believe in one God rather than three prevented them from challenging Muslims to show how, without adopting a Trinitarian view of God, God’s activity in human history and in the universe can be adequately affirmed? In other words, in the phrase of Karl Rahner, should Christian Trinitarian belief be considered the radicalization of monotheism?

     One and the same God?

It might be worth prefacing our reflections on such questions with a more basic one, but one which is still occasionally raised. Do Muslims and Christians believe in the same God? From a Christian point of view, does the Islamic denial of the Trinity result in such a fundamentally contradictory conception of God’s nature that Muslims cannot be considered as worshiping the same God as Christians? Conversely, for Muslims, does Christian Trinitarian doctrine remove Christians from the family of monotheist believers?

The idea that the terms God and Allah refer to distinct and rival divinities is not new. Giuseppe Verdi’s 1843 lyric opera I Lombardi alla prima crociata reflects the popular European perception of his time in the Crusader chorus “O stolto Allah, sovra il capo ti piomba / Già dell’ira promessa la piena” (O foolish Allah, upon your head will crash / the fullness of promised wrath.) It is clear that the librettist regards Allah as a rival deity to the God professed by Christians. On the other hand, Arabic theological tradition, Muslim and Christian, including the polemical writings, has never raised the issue of distinct divinities, but has always presumed that Allah is the common name for the One God worshiped by both communities but concerning whom they have points of disagreement.

The question continues to have practical implications. Some conservative Christians refused to accept the Pope’s invitation to take part in the 1986 and 1991 Days of Prayer for Peace in Assisi because they denied that Jews, Muslims and, a fortiori, followers of other religions would be praying to the same God. On the other side, some Muslims in Malaysia pressured the government to ban the use of the term Allah by Christians in bahasa malaysia because they rejected the notion that Christians were praying to the same God as the One revealed in the Qur’ân.

Among Roman Catholic Christians, the issue would seem to have been settled by the declaration of the Second Vatican Council that “they [Muslims] worship with us the One God.” ⁽⁶²⁾  Lest any doubt remain, Pope John Paul II has repeatedly stressed that Muslims and Christians believe in and worship one and the same God. Among the many examples which could be given, three must suffice. In his address to Muslims in Morocco in 1985, he stated: “We [Christians and Muslims] both believe in one God, the only God, who is all justice and all mercy.” ⁽⁶³⁾  In the same year, in Rome, he stated to a visiting Muslim delegation: “Your God and ours is one and the same, and we are brothers and sisters in the faith of Abraham.” ⁽⁶⁴⁾  Referring to Muslims in a May, 1999, catechesis he stated, “We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who created the world and brings his creatures to their perfection.” ⁽⁶⁵⁾ 

As early as the 1970s, statements of the World Council of Churches, while not binding on member Churches, have made similar declarations. For example, in a joint statement in Ghana in 1974, the Muslim and Christian international delegations affirmed: “Both [Muslims and Christians], in their recognition and adoration of the One God, share a monotheistic tradition.” ⁽⁶⁶⁾  Perhaps Kenneth Cragg, with his grammatical image, has stated the issue most clearly and succinctly: “When we [Christians and Muslims] refer to God, the subject is the same. On the predicates we differ.” ⁽⁶⁷⁾ 

For Christians, there is a deeper motivation than mere adherence to statements of their leaders why they must affirm the essential identity of the God of the Judaic, Christian, and Islamic traditions. It is the same God encountered by Moses, the God in whose name the prophets spoke, whom John the Baptist proclaimed, and whom Jesus taught his disciples to call Abba who is the one God worshiped by all three communities of believers. Rejecting the Allah of the Qur’ân is tantamount to rejecting the consistent affirmation of the Hebrew Scriptures and the great figures of the Gospels. What Christian would dare to claim that the God of the saints and prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures or the God of John the Baptist, Mary, and other Gospel figures is not the God of Christians because their understanding lacked a specific Trinitarian content?

     Did the Qur’ân misunderstand Christian belief?

Christians often claim, as did Paul of Antioch, that the Islamic rejection of the Trinitarian nature of God is based on a misunderstanding of Christian doctrine. Some go further to root this misconception in Qur’anic passages, an assertion which Muslims find offensive, as it implies either that Muhammad, rather than God, was the author of the Qur’ân or, what is even more blasphemous, that the Divine author of the Qur’ân was guilty of misunderstanding Christian teaching.

The Qur’anic passages which appear to reject the Trinity are not numerous but are emphatic in their rejection of trinitarian concepts. Two passages, both taken from Surat al-Mâ’ida, are typical: “They disbelieve who say: ‘God is one of three’” (5: 77); and “Recall when God said, ‘O Jesus, son of Mary, was it you who said to the people: Take me and my mother as two gods apart from God?’ He replied: ‘Glory be to You! It is not for me to say what is not true. Had I said it, you would know it’” (5:116). Such affirmations would seem to place a unsurmountable barrier to Muslim-Christian understanding on the nature of God.

However, such affirmations must be interpreted in their historical context. For centuries before the time of Christ, the “Semitic triad,” as Trimingham refers to it, was evident in the religiosity of both nomadic tribesmen and settled populations of the Syro-Arabian region. ⁽⁶⁸⁾  Although the names of the divinities changed from place to place, from tribe to tribe, there was widespread belief in the High God, called by some Arabs Allâh, that is, “the God” (al-Lah); his consort, sometimes called Allât “the Goddess” (al-Lat), and their son Ba’l (or Ba’l Shamîm), that is, “the Lord.” It was natural for partially Christianized Arab tribal nomads, poorly schooled in their faith, to identify the persons of this traditional triad with God “the Father,” Mary “the Mother of God,” and their son Jesus “the Lord.”

It is this primitive, pseudo-Christian understanding, implying, as it does, the physical generation of Jesus from a type of sexual union of God with Mary, which is strongly rejected by the Qur’ân. The same concept has also been consistently rejected by Christian theologians, bishops, and church councils. One could, in fact, find parallels in authoritative Christian sources, both before and after the time of Muhammad, to every Qur’anic condemnation of multiplicity and association in God. Thus, Qur’ân can be read as rejecting these same unworthy understandings of God, proclaiming God to be far above such improper intermingling and, in effect, confirming Christian condemnations of similar erroneous interpretations. The Qur’ân pronounces neither positively nor negatively on orthodox Christian trinitarian doctrine, because such was not encountered among the few semi-Christianized Arabs of the Hijâz region in which Mecca and Madina are located.

This argument is intriguing and somewhat convincing. One could wish for more hard evidence that the Semitic triad was worshiped not only by settled populations but also by nomadic Arabs. Moreover, most of the examples cited by Trimingham are taken from the northern reaches of the Arabian desert. In any case, so little is known about the form or forms Christianity may have taken in 7^th Century Hijâz or even whether Christianity in the Hijâz had progressed beyond the stage of isolated individuals who were attracted by or adopted some elements of Christian belief that it is difficult to move beyond conjecture and speculation.

     Arab Trinitarian formulations

However, Paul of Antioch’s view that if Muslims correctly understood Christian Trinitarian belief, they would find nothing in it opposed to true monotheism is an assertion that requires closer examination. The great Muslim polemicists, such as Ibn Taymiyya and ‘Abd al-Jabbar before him, did not reject the primitive understanding of nominally Christian Arab tribes, but rather the highly sophisticated Christian formulations of Baghdad, Damascus and Constantinople.

The two factors which influenced and shaped the development of Arab Christian theology in the Umayyad and Abbasid periods were the internal controversies between Byzantine (called Melkite in Arab sources), Nestorian, and Jacobite proponents and the ongoing polemical debates with Muslim scholars. As Muslims argued against proffered Christian formulations, the Christian arguments were revised and refined, inadequate terminology was replaced with new terms and concepts, and the debate resumed. On their side, as Wolfson has shown, Muslims were engaged in a similar process and it was largely through the symbiotic interaction of Muslim and Christian Arab scholars that the terminology and conceptualization of Islamic and Christian kalâm evolved. ⁽⁶⁹⁾ 

The early Christian Arab thinkers used terms borrowed from Greek to define Trinitarian concepts, such as the term uqnûm, from the Greek γvώμη (intellect), to indicate the divine hypostases. However, uqnûm with its connotations of individuality referring to an autonomous subject of being and activity, was gradually replaced by the native Arabic sifah, meaning attribute or characteristic.” Surprisingly, the word sifah does not appear in the Qur’ân, although the verbal forms of wasafa (to describe) are found. However, the term was much used in Islamic kalâm writings to indicate the specific attribute to which each divine name adhered.

Thus, the Arab Christian theological tradition developed in an intellectual context which contained two factors absent in the theological speculations produced in scholarly circles of Byzantine and Western Europe. Firstly, among Arab Christians, the Melkite theology which accepted the Trinitarian definitions of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon was but one of three vibrant currents of theology in competition for adherence by Christians. In Baghdad, for example, Nestorian “low” Christology was more deeply rooted than the Byzantine, while in Egypt the monophysite or Jacobite “high” Christology was dominant. This is in sharp contrast with the situation of Byzantine and Western European Christendom, where Nestorian and monophysite views were summarily dismissed as heretical. The second factor is that Arab Christian theology developed in an environment where any conceptualization of the Trinity had to be tested, even as it was being formulated, by the way in which that formulation would necessarily be heard and perceived by the omnipresent Muslim.
This latter factor led all three competing Christian theologies to formulate their Trinitarian understanding in terms of sifât as the normal translation into Arabic of the hypostases defined by the early Councils. The common Trinitarian understanding in Arab regions has always been that of “One God with three essential characteristics,” which produced an understanding significantly different in nuance from the Western tradition that translated hypostasis into Latin as persona and ultimately produced the novel concept in modern European languages of “Three persons in One God.” The Latin persona underwent a considerable historical evolution in meaning from its original sense in theater indicating a “mask” or “role,” (which survives in the phrase dramatis personae) to its modern understanding as referring to “a being possessing independent consciousness or rationality.” The Eastern theological tradition has generally rejected the Greek equivalent of “person,” πρoσωπov (prosôpon), in favor of _πoστασις (hypostasis) in Trinitarian formulations.

     Three persons in One God or One God in three modes of subsisting?

Karl Rahner, one of the few modern European theologians who has attempted to formulate Christian Trinitarian doctrine in full awareness of Islamic monotheist sensitivities, has noted that the terminology of “three persons in God” is, to say the least, “misleading and open to misunderstanding.” Although one can find an orthodox explanation of the phrase by redefining “person” out of its normal usage, the modern Christian and non-Christian will almost inevitably think in terms of “three subjects differing from one another in their subjectivity, knowledge, and freedom, and wonder what kind of logic it is that permits three persons understood in this way to be simultaneously one and the same God.” ⁽⁷⁰⁾ 

Just as in the 7^th Century the Qur’ân may well have been responding to something other than the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity, and Ibn Taymiyya’s 14^th Century response would have by necessity been governed by the limitations and contradictions in Paul of Antioch’s formulations, so Muslims of today, in their denials of Christian Trinitarian doctrine may in fact be denying Christian propositions that do not express well the content of that doctrine.

A more accurate statement of what Christian faith says of the Triune God can be achieved by use of the term hypostasis defined by the early Councils, which can perhaps best be translated as “mode (or manner) of subsisting,” which Rahner prefers, or “mode of being” as suggested by Barth. Speaking of the one God who subsists in three distinct modes is incidentally closer to the traditional Arab Christian formulation of one God with three essential characteristics or sifât.

An objection often raised against regarding the hypostases as “modes of subsistence” or “manners of subsisting” is that this is simply a reformulation of the modalist error of the 2^nd Century theologian Sabellius, whose writings were condemned by the Council of Nicea. However, at Nicea, the concept of modality as such was not condemned and, in fact, the Nicean Fathers incorporated much of Sabellius’ theology into their teaching. What was condemned in the thought of Sabellius was his view that the divine modes of being and acting were not part of God’s eternal nature, but rather ways of being which God adopted in time. The hypostatic modes were extrinsic to God’s unchanging nature, historically conditioned “accidents” rather than pertaining to God’s essence.

One must grant that Sabellius’ effort to preserve the Divine Unity, while his formulation had much to commend it, departed from the theological understanding of orthodoxy. The Council of Nicea affirmed the traditional belief that the Divine hypostases, or modes of God’s being and acting, were eternal rather than originating in time, real, rather than logical constructs, and essential, that is, pertaining by necessity to God’s essence and not extraneous characteristics added on to God’s nature. Any modern modalistic formulation of the Trinity must remain faithful to the Conciliar understanding of One God whose three modes of subsistence are eternal, real, and essential to the Divine nature.

     Mutual challenge of monotheist believers

We must proceed beyond the matter of adopting the most suitable terminology to the more difficult question of the way that monotheists must challenge one another on the implications of their commitment to worship the one God. On the one hand, Muslims (and Jews) must continually ask Christians whether their profession of faith in the Triune God does not amount to a disguised tritheism, a doctrine of divine unity to which the believer gives lip service but cannot verify in personal religious experience. To those for whom acknowledging the one God is not merely a metaphysical statement, but at the very heart of the believer’s faith, can Christians really consider themselves monotheists in more than theory? While professing “I believe in One God,” must they not relate to the divine as though standing before a troika of three divinities?

On the other hand, the Christian must continually ask the Muslim (and the Jew) whether they need to go farther to achieve the kind of radical monotheism that Christians seek to profess in the doctrine of the Trinity. Must not humans seek to conceive of God’s unity in a way that responds to the need to understand the ways in which this one, eternal, unchangeable, sovereign God is actively present in the material cosmos and in human history?

For all monotheist believers, questions regarding God’s oneness are not speculative ontological problems whose solution is to be sought in metaphysics, but rather efforts to know better this Living God who is continually creating, teaching, saving, and giving life. Christians’ experience of the history of revelation and salvation is of a threefold nature. It is an experience of the one God, who does not live and remain in a metaphysical remoteness, but continually seeks to impart God’s own self to created humans in truth and love as our own eternal life. From a Christian point of view, it is not a question of God’s revealing something other than God, but rather God’s own self-revelation to humankind in both our historical contingency as well as at the transcendent core of our existence. God’s historical self-revelation Christians find in the incarnation of God’s eternal message or Logos in the person of Jesus Christ. God’s active, transcendent presence at the heart, not only of human nature, but of the whole created universe, Christians call the Holy Spirit.

     Trinity as radical tahwîd

If our concept of God is not that of the distant totally Other, but rather God who has freely chosen to be part of contingent human history and who remains actively present at the innermost core of creation, it is not sufficient to speak of an eternal Message embodied in or mediated by a covenant, angel, or Sacred Book. We must consider God’s active presence in terms of divine self-revelation: God’s self-revealing presence in the vicissitudes of human life and God’s transcendent self-revelation in every sub-atomic particle of the cosmos. A radical monotheism, I suggest, requires that the one God have these two ways or modes of presence and activity in history and in creation and, moreover, that these modes be not created and not different from God. For if we are speaking of a genuine self-communication of God to the creature, then the very modes of communication must themselves be divine and not some created mediation.

For a believer who is content to worship and obey the incomprehensible God from an infinite distance, this discussion might appear irrelevant. But if we admit the possibility that God might also be intimately near, and if we respond to a religious thirst for intimate communication with this radically present God, this would seem to imply that God has ways or modes, which are themselves divine, not created, and not separate from God, by which God enters definitively into human history and also remains as a life-giving presence at the transcendent core of the created universe.

Anything less would lead to the need for forms of created mediation (angels, emanations, avatars etc.) and unacknowledged polytheism. In the Islamic tradition, cannot the Mu’tazili rejection of the eternal, uncreated nature of the Qur’ân be seen as an effort to avoid an implied duality and to assert a more radical monotheism? Does not the Christian understanding of the Holy Spirit as God’s own powerful, comforting presence in our midst correspond more to the Qur’anic concept of the uncreated sakîna ⁽⁷¹⁾  than to the usual ⁽⁷²⁾  Muslim identification of the Spirit with the created Jibrîl (Gabriel), the angelic agent of revelation?

The key differences between the Christian and the Islamic perceptions of the Living God would seem to come down to two. The first is the distinction between revelation and self-revelation, that is, between a God who reveals a Message and God who reveal’s God’s own living presence. Islamic faith speaks of revelation, Christian faith of self-revelation.

Secondly, if one believes that God is radically present in human history and at the transcendent core of the universe, one is lead to ask how God is present. Speaking of the “how” is to speak of modalities, the ways God actualizes this Divine presence. Whereas Islamic faith, in my view, does not address the question of modality, Christian faith holds that God’s ways are two, God’s historical self-revelation in the human person of Jesus and God’s transcendent and active presence at the heart of creation, which we call the Spirit. Thus the two divine processions and two missions of classical Trinitarian theology.

If Trinitarian belief is ultimately concerned with the ways or modalities by which God is present in transitory human history and in the cosmos, one might seek to explain the Christian belief in terms of Divine presence. A modern Christian theologian in the Arab world has formulated Christian Trinitarian belief in just such terms, speaking of al-hadrât al-ilâhiyya, the Divine presences: Allah hâdir la-na,” “God present for us,” whom we call Father, Allah hâdir ma’-na, “God present with us” in the incarnated Logos, Allah hâdir fi-na, “God present in us,” whom we call the Spirit. ⁽⁷³⁾ 

To conclude, I would like to return to Ibn Taymiyya’s central concern, that of tawhîd, the affirmation of Divine Unity. Tawhîd expresses a faith in the one God who created and still creates, who loves and reveals Godself to all men and women at all times, a God who saves and gives life. It is a faith in this one God who freely chose not to remain aloof from human history, but to enter into the human project as an embodiment of eternal wisdom, and to accept the consequences that flow from that decision. It is a faith that denies that everything in this universe is ultimately measurable, quantifiable, but affirms instead that at the heart of the smallest sub-atomic particle of matter, in the very energy that impels the expanding universe of galactic clusters, black holes, and cosmic threads is a divine spark, a transcendent something that cannot be grasped by human intelligence or instruments, because it is divine and hence essentially beyond matter and energy, the stuff of creation. This is what I mean by Trinitarian faith as the radicalization of monotheism.

As a Christian, I agree that tawhîd is both the goal of religious faith and the goal of theology as reflection on that faith. I agree also with his desire to avoid, on the one hand, ta’tîl, considering God so different and remote as to prevent a vibrant response in faith and, on the other, tashbîh, confusing and intermingling God with creation. I would describe the doctrine of the Trinity as radical tawhîd in affirming the ways or modalities by which the One Eternal, Infinite God is present “for us, with us, and in us,” in our history and universe, avoiding the ta’tîl of remoteness and irrelevance and avoiding the tashbîh of implicit polytheism by positing created mediations.

I don’t pretend to have arrived at a definitive formulation of the question. No doubt the debate between Muslims and Christians will continue - and should continue! - for centuries to come. Each has sound bases on which to challenge the other. If the Islamic vocation in our world remains that of witnessing to God’s true oneness and challenging any conceptualizations or formulations of the Divine which would attenuate or deny that Unity, the Christian vocation is to bear witness that this one and same God is radically close to humankind, has become part of our changeable human history, and unceasingly lives and works at the heart of the cosmos.

One might say that Muslims approach the Divine with the fundamental question, “Who?” and the answer of Islamic faith is “Allah, the One God.” Christians agree but then ask a second question, “How?” and the answer of Christian faith is “in three essential modes of Divine presence.”

     5. SIN AND REDEMPTION IN CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM ENCOUNTER

In the previous chapter, we explored some of the issues implied in the tension between the Islamic assertion of divine Oneness and the Christian profession of God’s “tri-une” nature, and we suggested that the Christian dogma of Trinity needs to be understood as a radical form of monotheism rather than its attenuation. If Christians and Muslims can recognize one another as professing diverse but genuine forms of belief in One and the same God, each with its own emphases and theological concerns, they might be able to discover a deeper level of agreement that goes beyond and unites the apparently contradictory dogmatic formulations of the two faiths.

In my opinion, the Christian doctrine of the redemption offers a more fundamental religious divergence between Christianity and Islam than that found on the question of divine unity. In my experience of teaching Christian theology in Islamic theological faculties, I find that the doctrine of the redemption is the element of Christian faith which Muslims find most inexplicable, gratuitous, and even blasphemous in its implications. I should state at the beginning that I will focus on the Sunni-Christian debate. As Mahmoud Ayoub has shown in his important study ⁽⁷⁴⁾ , the Shi’i tradition has always given an important place to redemptive suffering, though not, as he notes, in the Christian sense. The figure of Hussein in Shi’i piety and that of Christ in the Christian tradition produce fascinating parallels and contrasts but is outside the scope of this work.

Some years ago, a Muslim colleague stated the problem to me in the following way. “You Christians and we Muslims both believe that God is all-powerful and all-good. That means that God can do whatever God wants, and that God only wants to do what is best for humankind. In other words, when I sin and then repent of my sin and turn to God in forgiveness, God can forgive me because God is all-powerful, and God wants to forgive me, because God is all-good and merciful. If God can forgive and wants to forgive, God will forgive me. But if this is the case, why do you say that it was necessary for Jesus to die for our sins?”

My colleague was not trying to score polemical points but sincerely wanted to know why we Christians held what was to him such an absurd and soteriologically pointless doctrine. To him, the concept of redemption for sins appeared as superfluous, irrelevant, and opposed to what Christians and Muslims both profess to understand about God’s nature and the way God relates to sinful humanity. The doctrine of redemption seems to imply a denial or at least doubts about God’s ability or willingness to pardon the repentant sinner.

This is not a new objection. The 13^th century Muslim polemicist, Ahmad al-Qarâfi, writing a generation before Ibn Taymiyya’s monumental response to Paul of Antioch, posed the problem in the form of a conundrum. If, he said, Christ’s death on the cross was to expiate for mankind’s sins, did Christ gain forgiveness for those who repented or for those who did not repent? If it was for those who repented, Christ’s death was unnecessary. If it was for those who did not repent, they would not in any case be saved or find forgiveness through his death. ⁽⁷⁵⁾  In other words, if the sole precondition for forgiveness of sins is genuine repentance, Christ’s death - or any other form of vicarious redemption - is beside the point.

     Paul of Antioch’s view

In the medieval debate between Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya, the bishop’s treatment of the life and death of Jesus is, in my opinion, the most unsatisfying section of his apology. His concern is more to defend the doctrinal formulations of the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus and Chalcedon than to shed light on the significance of the evangelical message proclaimed in the New Testament. His treatment of the Incarnation aims at showing how a single person can have two natures which imply no disunity or internal contradiction. The Qur’anically attested miracles performed by Jesus are to him proofs of Christ’s divine nature which was not affected by his death on the cross, which solely involved Christ’s human nature.

In fact, the whole question of the redemption, which in any analysis must be seen as an integral and distinguishing characteristic of Christian faith, is in no way alluded to in Paul’s apology. Questions concerning why Christ died, the significance that Christians might find in his death, and what God’s action of raising Jesus from the dead can reveal about the nature of God and the meaning of suffering are all passed over in silence. I can easily understand how a Muslim who reads such an account will be led to conclude that the Christian dogma of the redemption is simply a late theological construct invented by theologians and imposed by Church leaders to give significance to an event that, in any case, had not been definitively established as historical fact.

It is true that medieval Muslim polemicists, like most Muslims who have studied Christian faith today, were far less acquainted with the epistles of Paul than with the material of the Four Gospels. The Islamic reluctance to include the epistles within the text of the divinely revealed Injîl brought by Jesus led their Christian interlocutors to argue almost exclusively from the Gospels, which they presumed to form a common ground for discussion with Muslims. This Gospel-oriented bias in Christian-Muslim polemics absolved Muslim students of Christian Scriptures from having to grapple with central elements of Pauline theology. Unlike Christian thinkers struggling to understand their own faith, Muslim scholars like Ibn Taymiyya did not have to treat verses such as the hymn in Ephesians that refers to Christ as “God’s free gift to us...in whom, through his blood, we gain our redemption, the forgiveness of our sins” (Ephesians 1:7).”

The early Fathers who reflected on the Ephesians hymn and, more generally, on the Pauline passages emphasized diverse aspects of redemption. While the Greek fathers stressed the restoration to divine life lost through sin, the Latin fathers emphasized the expiation of sins through Christ’s sacrificial death. With Augustine, the restoration of humankind to original righteousness lost by original sin became the central focus, while in the East, as in Origen’s commentaries, the salvation of the just before the time of Christ was considered a key effect of the redemption.

     Ibn Taymiyya’s response

What Paul of Antioch passed over in silence, Ibn Taymiyya considered a key difference between the two faiths. For him, the doctrine of redemption is an outstanding example of how Christian leaders have innovated beliefs that were never taught and which could never have been taught by the prophets, thereby producing “a religion brought neither by Christ nor by any other prophet.” (76) 

His objection begins with the sin of Adam and responds to an early Christian speculation on the meaning of the redemption. Formulated already in the 3^rd Century by Origin, the theory held that the devil had certain rights over humans due to Adam’s sin, but Satan was defeated when he wrongly tried to extend the domain of death over the sinless Christ. When the devil tried to imprison Christ after his crucifixion, Christ defeated him and released all those who had previously been held captive by Satan.

Ibn Taymiyya rejects the claim that “every descendant of Adam - prophet, messenger, or otherwise - was in hell in the bonds of Satan...and humankind was not saved from that until Christ was crucified.” ⁽⁷⁷⁾  According to Qur’anic teaching, Adam repented of his sin, God forgave him, chose him as prophet, and guided him in his ways. If God pardoned Adam’s sin, how is it possible that great and holy individuals like Abraham and Moses would later be held in the bonds of Satan for an offence that was already forgiven? Abraham’s own father was an unbelieving idolater, but God did not punish Abraham for his father’s misdeed, so why would God punish Abraham for a wrong committed by a more distant ancestor? Moses wrongly killed a man, but God forgave him. If God forgave Moses his own sins when he repented, why would God hold him in Satan’s bonds for the sin of another?

Moreover, he asks, what is the relation between the crucifixion, itself a horrible human crime, and God’s saving humankind from Satan’s power? If Satan had been acting in such an outrageously unjust manner towards humans, God need not have waited until Christ’s resurrection to release just and holy persons who had died from this oppression. If God knew that Satan was wrongly imprisoning upright individuals after their deaths, would it not have been possible for God to prevent Satan from his wrongdoing without the need for Christ to be crucified?

To Ibn Taymiyya, this speculation is nothing less than blasphemous. That God would resort to the stratagem of concealing the divine nature in the person of the sinless Christ in order to defeat Satan unworthily imputes deviousness and weakness to God. Moreover, if Satan had been properly given power to imprison souls in hell because of their sins and the sin of their father Adam, then it would have been improper to release them because of Christ’s sinlessness. On the other hand, if souls had wrongly been imprisoned by Satan, God would have set them free long before Christ was crucified.

If this argumentation appears today as a rather strained dissection of mythical language and imagery, it would nevertheless have been quite relevant to the Christian-Muslim debate in the time of Ibn Taymiyya, when Origen’s stratagem theory was still the dominant Christian explanation of the redemption, at least in Eastern Christianity. Paul of Antioch, perhaps himself unconvinced by Origen’s theory, chose to remain silent on the question of the redemption, although one cannot help feeling that had the bishop a better explanation to offer, he should have presented it..

By the mid-12th Century, when the bishop wrote his treatise, Anselm of Canterbury had already postulated a rationale for the redemption that would eventually gain wide acceptance in the Christian world. According to Anselm’s satisfaction theory, the gravity of offenses is measured by the dignity of the one offended. In the case of human sin against the infinitely great and good God, nothing less than the death of God’s own son can make up for the wrong. In the West, Anselm’s theory gradually came to replace that of Origen, but in the East, from which Ibn Taymiyya drew his Christian sources, the redemptive stratagem was still being repeated by Christian apologists.

     Challenge of Islam to the dogma of the redemption

One may ask whether, had Ibn Taymiyya been presented with Anselm’s satisfaction theory, he would have found it any more convincing and less blasphemous than Origen’s stratagem. I suspect that he would have applied the same logic to Anselm’s view and have come to a similar conclusion, that is, that such a theory ultimately negates God’s goodness and justice. Anselm’s theory, while not positing an elaborate ploy on the part of God to deceive and vanquish Satan, nevertheless envisions a God who demands the blood sacrifice of God’s own son in order to atone for human sin. No doubt Ibn Taymiyya would ask, as he did regarding the stratagem theory, what loving and just God would demand the blood of the sinless Christ, in a particularly vicious form of death by torture, in reparation for the sins of others? Especially if Jesus were in some way “son of God”! No human would be so unfair and cruel. No human father could be imagined permitting such a thing or failing to take all action within his power to prevent it. How can Christians, he would ask, claim such unworthy behavior of God?

To return to the words of my Muslim colleague, since God is able, God can forgive. Since God is good, God wants to forgive. If the only precondition for forgiveness is sincere repentance, why should God need to employ the drama of the death of Christ in order to make this forgiveness possible?

Faced with this apparently inexorable Islamic logic, the Christian must either sidestep the issue, as Paul of Antioch did, or be prepared, as some have done, to relativize the Christian doctrine of the redemption into a myth which can nevertheless teach some useful and morally uplifting lessons, or else to ask whether there are other issues important for human life before God which the Islamic logic has not addressed. It is some of these “other” elements, which Islamic thinkers have but rarely raised explicitly, that I would like to explore.

     Preliminary issues

If not only Muslims but also Christians today find the earlier explanations proposed by Origen, Anselm and others unacceptable, what can be said positively about the meaning of the redemption as a way of understanding how God acts in history to save men and women? One place to begin is with insights gained from the Biblical renewal. Christian thinkers today are more inclined than in previous times to take the evangelical narratives as the starting point of theology, rather than magisterial statements or Conciliar definitions. They recognize more clearly that the New Testament Scriptures are the books of the Church and reflect the faith of the apostolic communities that produced them. Hence they seek to rediscover the primitive faith of the early church of the early Church as the normative fundamentum for theologizing.

If we take seriously the New Testament Scriptures, we arrive at several preliminary conclusions that might serve to dispel some commonly-held misconceptions of Muslims and many Christians as well. Firstly, it is clear from the New Testament that Jesus did not want to die and that God did not desire Jesus’ death on the cross. What Jesus wanted was for people to accept his message, repent of their sins, be converted and allow God to reign in their lives. Moreover, God who never desires or wills or condones sin, could never have wished for or approved the many sinful acts and hateful attitudes involved in Judas’ betrayal, the treachery of the religious leaders, the venality of Herod, the cowardice of Jesus’ disciples, and the unjust sentence of death imposed on an innocent man by the Roman authorities.

We cannot ascribe a “martyr complex” to Jesus. The author of the Epistle to the Hebrews says: “During his life on earth, Jesus offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the One who had the power to save him from death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard” (Heb:5:7). The Gospel narratives that portray Jesus in the Garden expressing to God his inner revulsion at the suffering and death that were likely to befall him can only mean that for the early Christians, there was no thought that Christ desired or sought out suffering and death.

Secondly, it was not absolutely necessary that God incarnate God’s Word in the man Jesus, nor that Jesus’ death on the cross have a saving effect for mankind. God, who is supremely free and not constrained by any events of human history, or by history itself, could have worked in some other way. This is not a new idea, but formed the basis of Aquinas’ rejection of Anselm’s concept of the necessity of redemption through the death of God’s own Son. Aquinas taught that God could well have redeemed the world in other ways, but chose the manner of the death and resurrection of Christ because it showed the harmony between God’s justice and mercy and God’s wisdom and goodness. ⁽⁷⁸⁾  If this is the case, any understanding of Christ’s death which results in a portrayal of God as unjust, pitiless, ignorant or evil cannot be considered a truly Christian explanation of the redemption.

Christians believe that God chose to accomplish human salvation through the life and death of Jesus Christ, while admitting that God could have conceivably chosen countless other ways to accomplish this goal. Here the question of mediation is joined. Granted that the wholly sovereign and omnipotent God need not have employed any human mediation to save humankind, Christians claim that God chose to do so.

In itself, the notion of God working through a human mediator poses no contradiction between Christianity and Islam. According to Islamic teaching, God’s sovereign freedom does not preclude God’s employing human mediation - God can do what God wants - but Islam denies any need for God to use mediators. However, Christians and Muslims affrim that God has exercised saving power through human agents. In Islam, God uses the prophets as messengers to bring God’s Word, but the prophetic mission is not limited to the work of delivering a message. Prophets also accomplish other tasks in God’s name. Through Abraham, God established divine cult in the construction of the Ka’ba. Through Moses, God led the Jewish people out of Egypt. Through Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, God gave their people a sharî’a or religious way of life. The prophets even intercede for their people, as in Noah’s prayer for his family (71:26), or the mediation of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad for their communities on the Last Day.

According to Islamic teaching, Muhammad was not only the bearer of the Qur’anic message, but also strove to construct a social and political order formed according to teaching of the Qur’an. In his actions and decisions, he was the model Muslim, not merely the prophet who delivered the Qur’ân but also its ‘first hearer,’ the believer who lived the message of the Qur’ân in an exemplary way, so that his words and actions become sunna for the Islamic community.

In the case of Jesus, Christians believe that God not only incarnated the eternal Word in Jesus, but that his deeds, teaching, life, and tragic end have a special saving efficacy. The insights of narrative theology underline the efficacious divine power at work in the life of Christ. He began as a simple itinerant preacher, urging people to repent and turn away from sin and to accept God’s sovereignty. But he also healed by the power of God, confronted and expelled demons, defended those who were oppressed by the regulations and interpretations of religious leaders, and condemned those who corrupted pure religion by making it into a profitable business.

In the course of his ministry, Jesus realized that the path he had taken was putting him on a “collision course” with human selfishness, greed, and thirst for power. The Gospels record several attempts on Jesus’ life. If the Gospels can be believed, at least as a record of the faith of the early Christian communities, it became clear, especially by the time of his last visit to Jerusalem, that Jesus would not escape with his life from the situation of hatred which surrounded him. His apostles warned him not to go to Jerusalem because of the rumors of plots against his life. Statements of Jesus confirm that he knew that such stories were not idle tales.

None of this implies a “martyr complex” in Jesus or that he wanted to suffer and die. Although he did not want suffering and death, he freely accepted all that as the predictable consequence of his call to preach God’s Word without compromise or flight. According to the Gospel accounts, it was while he was still praying to be released from the cup of suffering that the Roman soldiers captured him, after which he was tried, sentenced to death, and crucified. The Gospels record that Pilate, the Roman governor, offered Jesus a “way out.” If he would retract or soften his teaching, Pilate could release him. But Jesus refused, not because he wanted to die, but because he was faithful and obedient to the mission which God had given him.

For Christians, therefore, the question is not why Jesus had to die, or why God wanted him to die. As the official Catechism of the Catholic Church states, we must not imagine that “those who handed him over [to death] were merely passive players in a scenario written in advance by God.” ⁽⁷⁹⁾  Granted the possibility that Christ’s ministry was not fated according to some divine determinism to end on a cross and could conceivably have had a happier outcome, but given the fact that this is the unjust and tragic way that Christ’s prophetic ministry ended, Christians ask: “What has God achieved for us in the death of Jesus and what does God teach us by it?”

The answer that a believer gives to such questions cannot be separated from one’s understanding of crucial issues like sin and salvation. Depending on how one understands the nature of sin and the meaning of salvation, one will be led to conclude either that redemption is congruent with God’s revelation in the prophetic tradition or else an anomaly that must be rejected. Because the Christian doctrine of the redemption is perhaps the most basic issue that distinguishes the Christian understanding of God’s salvific activity in history from that of Muslims, I would like to offer a response to the perceptive objections raised by Ibn Taymiyya and his co-believers to the Christian belief in the redemption.

One could say that there are basically three areas of human life in which people feel the need for salvation. ⁽⁸⁰⁾  Firstly, we are conscious of living in a human condition where egoism, injustice, and violence are a part of daily life and bring suffering to all. We feel oppressed by forces outside ourselves which influence the behavior of everyone despite one’s best intentions. Secondly, we realize that the evil in the world is not only the result of the sinful condition into which we are born, but also of our personal contribution to the long history of human sinfulness. This can be called the objective aspect of sin which defiles all persons before the infinitely holy and good God. Finally, there is the subjective aspect of each one’s need to repent, seek forgiveness and be transformed by God’s grace. To each of the ways in which people feel a need for salvation there corresponds, Christians understand the death and resurrection of Jesus as liberating evidence of God’s power to save.

     1. Liberation from sin and death

People feel oppressed by forces outside themselves which prevent them from attaining happiness. Paul says that we have been freed from the powers of sin, death, and demonic forces. I refer here not to personal sin so much as destructive attitudes, values and societal structures that are bigger than any individual and lead us to act in ways opposed to God’s will. These forces vary from culture to culture and age to age, but are always present in human societies in one form or another.

In some societies, it might be the fear of powerful forces of nature which strike down those who break the taboos. In secular societies, it might be a gross materialism and consumerism which persuades people that they will be happy so long as they surround themselves with beautiful objects and constantly enjoy new and exciting pleasures. Elsewhere, concepts of family honor, ethnic identity, or racial pride cloud sound judgment and lead people do terrible things that otherwise they would know to be wrong. Some societies preach youth, beauty, wealth, power or success as the factors which bring true happiness - a particularly bitter message for the vast majority of people who are not, in fact, young, beautiful, rich, powerful or successful.

Such attitudes are oppressive and cause misery. The Bible calls these societal attitudes “the sin of the world,” for which no one is individually responsible, but which negatively affect the lives of all. Christian theologians speak of “original” sin, in the sense that this sinful environment has exerted its influence on human life ever since the beginnings of the human race.

Christian and Muslim writers often seem to go out of their way to stress that one of the biggest differences between the two religions is the Christian doctrine of original sin and the Islamic denial of that doctrine. I am not sure that this contention bears up against the Scriptural evidence on either side. Certainly, Islam has no concept of the effects of Adam’s sin as somehow being transmitted to his descendants, but the Qur’ân is acutely aware of an inbuilt resistance in humans against believing what God teaches and against living according to God’s commands.

One need not posit a sin handed down genetically from Adam to recognize, as does the Qur’ân, that God has created humankind fi kabad (90:4), that is, “in disorder, affliction.” ⁽⁸¹⁾  The Qur’anic concept seems to be indicating the same human reality expressed in the Buddhist notion of dukkha, where humans find themselves inescapably living in a situation which is “out of kilter, disturbed, troubled,” like a dislocated bone. An innate inclination or tendency to evil, to act against one’s own best interests, is an element of the human condition to which the Qur’ân continually returns. The Qur’ân states, “The soul of man is truly prone to evil” or, more literally, “has a bias toward evil” (12:53).

Perhaps Christians over the centuries have done a disservice to this human reality by overemphasizing Adam’s sin as causative, rather than descriptive of the universal human condition which transcends individuals, cultures, and historical periods. However, the reality underlying the Genesis story of the Fall is that the sinful condition, that “bias toward evil” which has characterized human life from its very origins, which no individual has committed or performed but which affects everyone, has been around from the beginning.

If sin is conceived not only as personal acts of disobedience and wrongdoing, but as a disordered condition affecting all human life, then any understanding of salvation that seeks to respond definitively to this condition must go beyond God’s personal forgiveness of repentant sinners to include liberation from the sinful condition itself. True liberation must address not only the reality of the sinful acts of the individual, but the universal condition in which people find themselves and by which they are influenced, even against their will.

Moreover, it is not only living in an atmosphere infected by a human inclination to evil that oppresses humans. There is death which awaits us all. One can devote one’s life to the struggle for what is good - for justice, art, knowledge, human rights, peace, and alleviation of the suffering of the poor, etc. - yet it all ends in death. Anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a loved one must face the apparent waste and meaninglessness and asks whether love and devotion is worth the effort when all ends in annihilation. Is there any way to make sense out of life when death awaits both the just and the evildoer?

The first way in which Christians understand God’s saving deeds in Christ responds to the human tragedy of sin and death. Christians see Jesus’ death as liberation from these oppressive forces. He lived among us in innocence, preaching love and showing it by his service of the poor and the sick, calling people to truth and to love and obey God. When his teaching was rejected, he did not run away from death, nor did he oppose his enemies with the same weapons of force and falsehood they were using against him. He did not return hatred with hatred or violence with violence. His dying words, as recorded in Luke’s Gospel, were: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

His death by crucifixion was brutally painful, a despised form of execution reserved for slaves and evildoers. Most of his followers, including his closest apostles, abandoned him. Dying young, mocked and powerless before his enemies, his features disfigured by his own blood and wounds, an apparent failure in the mission he had set for himself, Jesus is the epitome of all that worldly wisdom says we should not be.

Yet Christians believe that God raised this man Jesus from the dead, and in doing so confirmed Jesus’ ministry, all that he taught and the way he lived. He triumphed over sin, not by fighting back with the human methods used by his enemies, but by placing his trust in God and submitting himself in obedience to God, even to dying on a cross. According to Christian belief, just as Jesus triumphed over sin on the cross, so also he triumphed over death in his resurrection. For Christians, Jesus’ resurrection is the sign of God’s mighty power to bring life out of even the most shameful death, to bring success out of the most obvious failure, to transform even the most hideous suffering into joy. In raising Jesus to life, God shows that death, the final enemy, has no lasting power over us. Paul asks, “Death, where is your victory? Where is your sting?”

Among all religions, Christianity is unique in having as its central symbol of faith an instrument of torture. Muslims have often noted that this seems like a rather morbid fascination with suffering and death. However, to a Christian the cross is a constant reminder that God has triumphed over sin and death and all those forces of evil which bind and oppress humankind.

One might well object that this is unrealistic. It is obvious that we live in a world where sin and death still abound. Injustice, violence, cruelty, and hatred still exist, and people still die. The New Testament teaches that God has overcome these forces through the death of Jesus and has shown that sin and death need not control our lives. We live in an interim period when, although God has achieved victory over sin and death in Jesus’ death and resurrection, the final victory is still to come. Hence, Christians live and work in this world with hope in God’s power and await the time when God’s total victory over sin and death will be fully manifest in creation.

     2. Atonement for sin

The concept of sin refers not only to the disordered condition in which humankind finds itself. When Christianity and Islam address the question of sin, most often they are referring to personal sin committed by individuals. On this matter, Muslims and Christians find they have much in common, in contradistinction, for example, to religions of South Asian and East Asian provenance.

Islam regards sin is a personal act of disobedience and wrongdoing (zulm), a spiritual sickness whose primary victim is the sinner himself. Unless the individual reject sin and disobedience in sincere repentance, there is no forgiveness and no salvation. This cannot happen without God’s grace, and hence God’s saving activity in human history can be defined as God sending through the line of prophets the same basic call to repent, to accept God’s sovereignty, to obey God’s will and thus to be granted salvation.

The effects of sin do not remain outside the human person. In the Psalms of David, there are repeated pleas to “cleanse me of my guilt.” People feel themselves contaminated, stained, dirtied by their involvement in sinful mankind. In most religions, washing the body symbolizes our recognition of the contamination of sin and our need for the cleansing power of God’s grace. For Jews and Muslims, purifying oneself before prayer is itself a religious act. In Christianity, the first sacrament of God’s power is baptism, an immersion in water. We all realize that we have been “infected” by sin and need a washing away of our guilt.

The second way by which Christians understand the death of Jesus is in terms of “atonement” or expiation for sin. Christians agree with Muslims that when a person gives oneself over to sin, the proper relationship with God is disrupted. When individuals repent, God generously forgives them and immediately wipes out their personal or “subjective” guilt. In this sense, both Islam and Christianity preach the ready availability of God’s abundant forgiveness which requires sincere repentance as its only precondition.

Nevertheless, there remains the enormity of the objective wrong which sin commits against the goodness of God and the moral order. This is goes beyond the individual sinner to contaminate the whole human race and is the source of our feelings of “uncleanness.” To ignore the serious disruption of the moral order brought about by sin and to concentrate solely on personal guilt could cheapen God’s generosity in forgiving and could almost result in treating evil lightly. The atonement model for understanding Christ’s death attempts to take seriously the wrongness of sin and avoid the trivialization of evil.

Just as all people share in the “objective” disorder caused by sin, Christians believe that one representative of humankind can atone for that wrong. Christian faith holds that Jesus accomplished this atonement for the objective disruption of sin once for all time. By his act of submission and obedience, Jesus broke down the barrier which sin erects between the infinitely good God and rebellious humans. This act could not be performed by anyone, but only by one who was himself without sin and united to divine Wisdom, that is, the right order of the universe.

Some Christian preachers have pictured Jesus’ act of atonement as satisfying an angry God who demanded the death of God’s own son. This view, which has no basis in Scripture, presents God as a cruel and vengeful tyrant rather than the loving Father taught by Jesus. By contrast, Christian faith holds that Jesus freely accepted suffering and death, acting as representative of the human race to atone for all the sins ever committed against God. We do not need to posit a conscious awareness in Jesus of this meaning of his death. It is rather a post-Resurrection reflection by the early Christian communities. As at the annual Day of Atonement ritual in the Jewish Temple, the sacrificial blood was poured by the priests on the golden lid - the “mercy seat”, as Tyndale translated Luther’s Gnadenstuhl, - of the Ark of the Covenant to wipe away the people’s sins of the previous year, so Paul sees Jesus as the new “mercy seat” who in shedding his blood has achieved for humanity once and for all what the Day of Atonement ritual symbolized every year for Jews.

Christians sometimes speak of Jesus’ death in terms of sacrifice, but this must be understood in the Jewish context of sacrifice. Unlike pagan sacrifices, Jewish Temple worship was not meant to appease an angry God or to bribe God into doing something which God would not otherwise do. In the Hebrew Bible, it is God, not humans, who takes the initiative for sacrifice, who sets up rites by which people can come into union with God, who provides opportunities for people to pledge themselves to live and die in obedience to God. For the Jews, the blood sprinkled on the altar, which symbolized God, and on the people, symbolically expressed the communion of life shared between God and the people. This basic meaning of a covenant of shared life between God and the people is seen by Christians as having been renewed in Jesus’ death, in which a new universal covenant between God and the whole human family has been established. This new life is one where the objective guilt for sin is no longer an obstacle, for the whole human race has been reconciled to God by Jesus as its representative.

     3. Transforming love

This brings us to a third way by which Christians understand the death of Jesus. It is that of the power of love to touch and change human hearts and transform a person’s life. In John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “There is no greater love than that a man lay down his life for his friends.” This corresponds to a third way in which people feel a need for salvation. It is not only forces outside of us which oppress us, not only the sense of contamination which comes from being part of sinful humanity, but it is also our own interior drives that lead us to rebel against God and do wrong. This is the subjective nature of sin and guilt. Left to ourselves, we would, through our personal greed, pride, anger, lust, envy, and laziness, destroy our own lives and those of others.

When we have sinned and repent, God readily forgives us, Muslims and Christians are agreed on this point. But, in itself, forgiveness is not enough. We still need God’s power and grace to transform us into what we could be and what God desires us to become. Christians find in the example of Jesus the inspiration and the grace to imitate him and to be transformed by him. One could say that the model of selfless love which Jesus gave is the central ideal that Jesus handed on to his disciples. It has inspired men and women to high degrees of generosity and forgiveness. Many Christians have been guided by Jesus’ words when he washed the feet of his disciples, “I have given you an example. If I, who am your master, have washed your feet, so you should wash each other’s feet.”

Muslims often point out that these are beautiful words, but that it is difficult to see them actually practiced in the life of Christians. Christians do not seem to be more generous, loving, serving, or forgiving than anyone else. Christian history itself can be read as a series of wars, vengeance, ambition, greed, intolerance, and colonial domination. It was Christians who invented the Inquisition and carried out the massacres of the Crusades. It was Christian Europe that perpetrated the Sho’ah in which millions of Jews, Gypsies, and others were sadistically murdered.

This criticism stands as a strong indictment of Christians, and the evildoing can only be explained as the work of Christians who ignore or refuse to follow the central teaching and example given by Jesus. However, the Christian reality consists not only of intolerance, war, and domination, but also of individuals and groups whose vision, attitudes, and deeds have been formed by the example and power of Christ which has transformed them into more loving, self-giving, forgiving people. It is by looking at those Christians who have allowed Christ’s love to guide and shape their behavior that one can see the effects of Jesus’ loving act. It is in their lives that the effects of Christ’s redeeming, transforming love can be seen.

     Conclusion

In this chapter I have perhaps belabored what for Christians is basic catechism and what may appear to Muslims as the latest in a long series of apologetics. However, given the centrality of the issues of sin, salvation, and redemption to our respective understandings of God’s saving deeds in human history, I have tried to take up the points raised by Ibn Taymiyya in his intelligent and insightful critique and in doing so bring the seven-century old debate into the context of our new century.

     6. MOVING BEYOND THE BURDENS OF HISTORY

In the previous lectures, we examined the main points of the debate between Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya: the issues of prophecy, Scripture, God’s oneness, and sin and redemption. In this final lecture, we will take up the final point controverted between the two authors, that of religion itself. Can religions be compared one to another? What are the characteristics of divinely-revealed religion? Can only one religion be considered true, while others must be held to be false? Is eternal salvation limited to the followers of one religion, to the exclusion of others? Quite concretely, can Christians and Muslims live together in the future better than they have in the past?

Neither of our two polemicists can be claimed to have spoken the last word on these basic issues. Later Christians and Muslims have continued to offer their own appraisals, building upon the views of those who preceded them, discarding some notions as untenable and applying their observations to continuously changing circumstances. Features of our modern age which were non-existent or marginal at the time of Paul and Ibn Taymiyya have dramatically altered the discourse. In the medieval Mediterranean world, there were only three claimants to the title of “the true religion”: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Today Muslims and Christians live in the same societies with Hindus, Buddhists, and Taoists, whose religious roots are more ancient than either Christianity or Islam, as well as with Sikhs, Bahais, and others whose religious paths did not yet exist in the days of Paul and Ibn Taymiyya.

Since the Enlightenment, the basic assumption shared by Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya that religion is a necessary and positive force in human life has been challenged. Is religious belief a relic of primitive superstition to be superceded by education and good government? Is religion to be regarded as an opiate that hinders people from attaining their rights to justice and freedom? Is religious identification a self-justifying factor leading to fanaticism, sectarian strife and religious wars, ultimately doing more harm than good? Some ask a more radical question, whether religion and the God to whom it points is merely a consoling fiction created by human imagination in response to the need for consolation in a trouble-filled world. Such questions nowhere arise in the medieval debate which forms our point of departure. Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya shared much in their religious outlook that today cannot be taken for granted. To the modern reader they appear to hold more in common with one another than with their respective co-believers today. Nevertheless, I believe that we can find food for reflection in viewing the way that these medieval thinkers posed the question of religion in the context of their age.

     Religion of law and religion of grace

Paul of Antioch’s treatise, as I have already noted, is more an apology for Christian faith than a polemic against Islam. He never attacks Islam directly but tries to show that a correct reading of the Qur’an should lead Muslims to recognize that no element of Christian faith is denied by Islam. His deferential attitude towards Islam contrasts with the harsh nature of his polemics against Jews and other Christians. His approach to Islam cannot be explained as an expression of the discretion with which authors from minority groups customarily defer to the sensitivities of the majority. His diocese of Saida, in modern Lebanon, lay entirely within the boundaries of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. Perhaps he sincerely believed that a caustic polemical approach would make no headway with his Muslim neighbors. Perhaps as an Arab Christian governed by Frankish rulers, he had a sense of fellow-feeling with local Muslims with whom he shared culture and language.

In any case, the bishop waited until his final topic to go on the offensive, at which point he sweepingly rejects Islam as a religion simply by ignoring its existence. Revealed religion, he claims, is of two kinds: religion of law and religion of grace. To the bishop, Judaism is the religion of law, while Christianity is the religion of grace. In order to manifest His justice, God sent the prophet Moses to the children of Israel to establish a law of justice and commanded them to follow its prescriptions. When the time was right, God incarnated his eternal Word in Jesus to establish the religion of grace or the perfect religion. “After perfection,” he states, “nothing else remains to be instituted.” There is no need for anything more, since perfection has already been achieved in Christianity. The obvious conclusion to be drawn is that Islam is superfluous, a gratuitous appendage to a divine history of salvation which had already achieved its climax in Jesus Christ.

     Earlier Muslim responses

Ibn Taymiyya was not the first Muslim to respond to the bishop. Two earlier polemicists, whose works are still unpublished, responded to the treatise. The 13^th century Cairene Ahmad al-Qarâfi rejected Paul of Antioch’s categorization of religions. Judaism was not simply law, he held, but also contained many kinds of grace, whereas Christianity was basically a restatement of what was already found in the Torah, with the addition of moral exhortations derived from the upright qualities of Jesus. As a mere restatement, the Gospel does not deserve to be called the “religion of grace.” When, however, the teaching of Moses and Christ were abandoned in later ages by the self-styled followers of these prophets, Muhammad was sent with the true religion of grace.

Muhammad ibn Abi Tâlib, a Damascene contemporary of Ibn Taymiyya, also penned a response to Paul of Antioch. His position was that from the beginning of the human race there had been only one din or religion which combined law and grace, the one religion preached by all the prophets. The legal and ritual systems (sharâ’i’) legislated by the various prophets were partial expressions of the one dîn, but only in Islam and its sharî’a was the fullness of perfection in law and grace of the one prophetic religion achieved.

     Ibn Taymiyya’s response

Ibn Taymiyya’s treatment is far more extensive than that of his predecessors. He is the only one of these scholars who saw that Paul of Antioch’s final point betrayed his true judgment on Islam. Whereas before, Paul was defending Christian faith from the attacks of Muslims, in his final section he treats Islam as an uninvited interloper in the history of salvation, too late to add anything of value to what had been already perfectly instituted. Islam could not have been from God who had already made a final statement to humanity in Christ and therefore basically fraudulent.

Ibn Taymiyya’s main contention is that Paul of Antioch has misdrawn the relations between the religions. He claims that a more accurate but admittedly simplistic analysis would be that Judaism is the religion of law, Christianity the religion of grace, and Islam the religion which perfectly combines law and grace. In other words, Judaism tends to command justice without a corresponding exhortation to goodness. Christianity emphasizes goodness without a corresponding demand for justice. Islam perfectly balances the demands of justice and goodness. It is to Ibn Taymiyya’s credit that he immediately notes that this is a caricature. Both Moses and Jesus obliged justice and called people to goodness, although the concern for justice predominates in the Torah and goodness is the main emphasis of the Gospel. His point is that he sees both Judaism and Christianity as in themselves deficient or, at least, lacking balance, so that if God’s purpose in establishing religion is to be worshiped and obeyed by all humankind, perfect religion must combine the strengths of these two religions and counterbalance their weaknesses.

Ibn Taymiyya sees Islam as providing this balance in two areas, in that of revealed truth and that of practical morality. In the matter of revelation, the Qur’an has taught much that was either unclear or not mentioned in the Torah. For example, the Qur’an depicts the afterlife and describes the Garden and the Fire. It portrays various classes of angels, speaks of the creation of humans and jinn, tells the stories of the Arab prophets and the controversies between the prophets and their opponents. It recounts the names of God and gives information on other religions. The Gospel does not add much new revelation to what had already been known from the Torah, but mainly consists in moral lessons and exhortations to asceticism. He states:
In the Gospel, there is no independent shari’a, nor any teaching about God’s absolute oneness, nor the creation of the world, nor the stories of the prophets and their people. The Gospel refers people to the Torah for most of those matters. Christ, however, permitted some of what had been forbidden and taught people to do good, pardon offences, bear injuries, and undertake ascetical practices.    

Unless they be balanced and fulfilled in Islamic justice, both earlier religions result in oppression. On its own, the Jewish law leads to rigidity and unjust severity, while Christianity tends towards laxity and acquiescence to evil. To demonstrate his point, he takes up the famous Gospel verse: “love your enemies and do good to those who wrong you,” claiming that such teaching will lead to injustice to victims unless it be balanced by the severity of Qur’anic judgments against wrongdoers. If those who are mistreated and oppressed are forbidden to seek justice from their oppressors and obliged to turn the other cheek and forgive, this amounts to a second injustice added on to the first. Firstly, they are wronged and oppressed and, secondly, they are required to accept and pardon the evildoer.

He sees Islam as the moderate, just path between severity and lenience. The Torah preaches “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,” while the Gospel teaches “to whomever would steal your tunic, give also your cloak,” and “do not ask your property back from the one who robs you.” This teaching, unless supplemented by sanctions against those who have perpetrated wrongs against others and systems for redressing the wrongs, is tantamount to an abandonment of the rights of victims to just retribution. By contrast, the Qur’an, while permitting the pursuit of strict justice to the limit of the wrong committed, always recommends forgiveness as something better.

The Gospel teaching, as interpreted by Christians, would lead to the triumph of evil on earth and a breakdown of social relations. He states: “Were we to commend the avenger of every slain person not to take vengeance upon the killer, that each creditor should not demand payment but invite it voluntarily, that every person who is struck or slandered should not demand justice from the one who did wrong, there would be no deterrent to restrain evildoers, and the strong would oppress the weak.” He is careful not to accuse Christ of such unjust and destructive teaching. When Jesus counseled such behavior, he gave no indication that he was commanding acts whose omission would be deserving of punishment. Rather, Christ’s teaching should be understood as recommendations of what is better or, in the categories of Islamic jurisprudence - sunna, mandûb, or mustahabb - that is, praiseworthy deeds which are not obligatory but whose performance will be rewarded by God.

In any case, Christians have not generally followed Christ’s teaching nor established a legal system to redress wrongs. Unlike Muhammad who set up a divinely revealed legal system, the Gospel counsels provide no basis for legal judgments. Christians resort to a double legal system, with personal affairs judged by ecclesiastical courts which have no authority to protect victims in matters of homicide, theft and slander. For such matters they turn to civil rulers who, lacking a revealed law, dispense justice according to their own opinions. This is especially dangerous when the rulers are themselves the oppressors or when they arrogantly refuse to follow divine guidance.

     Salvation of Jews and Christians

An interesting element of Ibn Taymiyya’s thought is that professing Islam to be the perfect combination of law and grace does not mean that all Jews and Christians are destined for hellfire. Before the prophetic mission of Muhammad, those Christians and Jews who strove to follow the unaltered teachings of Jesus and Moses were among the blessed. After God sent Muhammad, those who are convinced that Muhammad is a true prophet and that the message he brought is from God, but reject him for reasons of pride or worldly advantage, are unbelievers. But Ibn Taymiyya is careful not to pronounce eternal punishment on the mass of Jews and Christians either before or after the time of Muhammad. In contrast to those explicitly condemned in the Qur’an, like Pharaoh and his people, the fate of these non-Muslims is a matter known only to God.

He cites the Qur’anic verse “Those who believe [i.e., Muslims] and those who are Jews, Christians and Sabaeans, in fact anyone who believes in God and the Last Day and acts honorably, will receive their earnings from their Lord” (2:62/5:69) as containing the basic principles on which God has taught that eternal salvation will be based. Ibn Taymiyya goes on to comment: “Whoever follows the messengers - believers, and Jews, Christians and Sabaeans as well - who build upon these principles, which are faith in God, the Last Day, and good works, will find happiness in the afterlife. Their reward is with the Lord; they need not fear nor will they be disappointed.”

Those Jews and Christians who have not deliberately distorted the text or meaning of their Books and strive conscientiously for the truth have a status analogous to that of mujtahid. A mujtahid is one who does ijtihâd, that is, who exerts one’s efforts to discover the truth of a matter. Ibn Taymiyya is known as one of the main proponents among Islamic scholars of the principle of ijtihâd. All Muslims, to the extent of their ability and knowledge, have the duty to seek God’s will in every circumstance of life. When the right and wrong of an issue is unclear, they must exert their efforts to seek the truth. The very effort to seek the truth and follow God’s will insofar as they understand it deserves recompense. He cites a hadîth from Muhammad which states that the mujtahid will be rewarded for his conscientious efforts, and if his ijtihâd leads to the correct conclusion, he will be doubly rewarded. Even if their ijtihâd leads to an erroneous conclusion (khata’), they will be rewarded for their honest efforts.

By extending this concept to include the conscientious Jew or Christian who have not consciously opposed or rejected Muhammad nor deliberately changed the teachings of the earlier prophets, he concludes that they will be rewarded for their honest desire to seek the truth and do God’s will. If their search leads them to the truth of the Islamic faith, they will receive a double reward. They will not be punished, he states, for what they do not know. In other words, Christians or Jews who honestly seek to follow the truth and do good to the best of their knowledge will be rewarded by God, and if their efforts eventually lead them to Islam, their reward is twofold.

     Christian theology of religions

Ibn Taymiyya’s view, which posits a firm basis in Islamic theology and jurisprudence for the possibility of salvation for the followers of the People of the Book, introduces a much-controverted issue in Christian theological circles today in what is called “the theology of religions.” Though its roots can be traced as far back as Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, and Clement of Alexandria, the possibility of salvation for followers of other religions was solemnly affirmed, by the Catholic Church, in the documents of the Second Vatican Council.

In phrases that invite theological speculation rather than attempt definitive solutions, the Council
documents call on Christians to view the followers of other faiths within the scope of God’s one plan of salvation for humanity. “Those who have not received the Gospel are oriented to the people of God (LG, 16).” The followers of other religions are “in contact with divine realities” (AG, 11). Their doctrines reflect “rays of the Divine Truth that illumines every person” (NA, 2). Christ is “in some way united with every person” (GS, 22). “Grace is invisibly at work in the heart of every person of good will” (GS, 22). “The Holy Spirit makes it possible for everyone to be in contact, in a way known only to God, with the Paschal mystery” (GS, 22).

Subsequent teaching by the Pope has added to such phrases that demand further elaboration. The teachings and practices of other religions are “an effect of the Spirit of Truth operating outside the visible confines” of the Church, as John Paul II said in his first encyclical Redemptor hominis (RH, 6,12). In his catechesis of 9 September 1998, he seems to indicate that other religions - in their foundation, doctrines and practices - are inspired by the Holy Spirit:
“The quest of the human spirit for truth and goodness...is inspired by the Holy Spirit. The various religions arose precisely from this primordial openness to God. At their origins we often find founders who, aided by God’s Spirit, achieved a deeper religious experience. Handed on to others, this experience took form in the doctrines, rites and precepts of the various religions...A ray of divine Wisdom is shown through the fulfillment of the precepts and practices that conform to the moral law and to authentic religious sense.”

Such statements raise more questions than they answer and have given rise to much theological reflection. How does the Spirit of Truth operate outside the visible confines of the Church? How can those who have never heard of Jesus of Nazareth be somehow related to his Paschal mystery? How can those who do not proclaim Jesus Christ as Savior find salvation? It is beyond the scope of these lectures to review the vast amount of theological writing which has variously proposed ecclesiocentric, Christocentric, Logocentric, theocentric, and pneumatocentric models of salvation, the controversies between Chalcedonian and neo-Chalcedonian perceptions of divine activity in history, the distinctions between the Church and the Reign of God, and the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the cosmic Christ or the relation between the Logos asarkos and the Logos ensarkos. Suffice it say that in this new theological field, Catholic scholars are seeking to understand better the conviction stated by the Second Vatican Council on which all agree, that is, that God’s saving grace is not limited to Christians but includes all people.

Specifically in regard to Islam, it is instructive to compare the text of Lumen gentium with the passage of Ibn Taymiyya cited above. The Council document states: “God’s plan for salvation embraces also those who recognize the Creator. Among these, in the first place are Muslims who, professing to hold the faith of Abraham, worship with us the One merciful God who will judge all humankind on the Last Day” (LG, 16). Ibn Taymiyya, writing over 670 years ago, stated the Qur’an-based principles on which fellow monotheists can find eternal happiness: “faith in [the one] God, the Last Day, and good works.” The stated principles are virtually identical. The omission of “good works” in Lumen gentium is not significant, because the companion document, Nostra aetate, praises the followers of Islam for their esteem of the moral life and their practice of prayer, almsgiving and fasting - three of the pillars of Islam.

It need hardly be mentioned that neither Ibn Taymiyya nor the Council document give unqualified approval of the followers of other faiths. Both address the possibility of salvation of those outside their own communities and prudently refrain from pronouncing that God has or does save people of other faiths. Moreover, each recognizes clear limits. According to Ibn Taymiyya, those who knowingly change the teachings of the prophets or who reject one whom they know to be a prophet will not find salvation. The Council, working with a broader frame of reference than the three religions of Abraham, is careful not to accept every human phenomenon which claims religious status, nor to claim that everything in every religion has been inspired by the Holy Spirit.

Discernment is always necessary, and each religion inevitably determines its own criteria for discerning between what is from God and what finds its origins either in human motivations or even demonic activity. I do not find any arrogance in setting criteria for discerning, so long as believers are self-critical in their awareness of human and demonic motivation within their own religious traditions and so long as they do not try to impose their own criteria for discernment upon communities of other faiths.

     Factors that lead to tension and conflict

If Muslims and Christians can both find sound bases in their own traditions for mutual esteem and the possibility God’s saving action toward the followers of each other’s religions, we must ask why relations between the two communities reflect so much enmity and so little fellow-feeling. No observer of past history or of international affairs today can deny that competition, tension, and conflict characterize relations between the two faith communities more often than mutual acceptance and recognition, practical cooperation for the common welfare, or common witness to jointly-held human and divine values. Without pretending to give a comprehensive answer, I believe several factors merit our attention.

1. Exclusivist attitudes. In the past century, theological differences have played an insignificant role in Muslim-Christian tensions. The kind of intellectual polemic carried on by Paul of Antioch and Ibn Taymiyya is today, for most Christians and Muslims, more of historical interest than any strong motivation for conflict. The polemics carried on in our time are not those of serious scholars but of popular preachers like the Muslim Ahmad Deedat and the Christian evangelist Jimmy Swaggert, and seem to have little effect beyond that of reassuring their own supporters of the superiority of previously-held convictions.

Projects of proselytism and da’wah presume that the propagator has a truth that the other lacks, but needs, and do not allow for the possibility that God is already actively involved in the others’ lives. A Christian conviction that unreached masses must receive the Gospel leads evangelists to seek conversions among Muslims, an effort which often is met with anger and resistance by the followers of Islam. It is estimated that 80% of foreign missionaries from Christian nations are of evangelical orientation who are committed to plant the Gospel among the “unreached.”

The latest mission field would seem to be cyberspace. I recently called up the topic “evangelical outreach to Muslims” on a typical internet search engine and was presented with 402,940 web pages replete with demographic profiles, strategy sheets, sample sermons, packaged refutations, and appeals for funds. For their part, some Muslim preachers and organizations announce their campaign to save Europe from unbelief and proclaim, on their web pages, Islam to be the fastest growing religion in Western Europe and North America. Perhaps this is so, but one would like to see evidence for such extravagant claims. Other scholars claim, for example, that Jehovah’s Witnesses and Buddhists are growing faster.

2. Confessional identification. A second factor that negatively influences Christian-Muslim relations is that of confessional identification. Obviously, Christian-Muslim relations do not exist in a vacuum. Political issues as well as national structures and international affairs impinge on relations between Muslims and Christians. It has become a cliché to say that local conflicts which break down along religious lines are usually motivated by economic or ethnic factors rather than religious beliefs. Christians and Muslims living in the same region frequently state that normal, day-to-day relations between the two communities are harmonious; problems arise from what they call politics. This reflects the common perception in both groups that, left to themselves, the two communities could find a way to live together without tensions and conflicts if intrusive forces, generally denoted by the term politics, did not intervene.

When the parties in a given conflict align themselves along the lines of confessional groups, it is because religion denotes not only a system of belief and practice, but also forms the basis of identification with an recognizable group in society who share a common history and identity. The individual’s personal status and well-being are tied to that of the group. If the religious group is insulted or undervalued, the individual is personally outraged. If the dignity of the group is honored, the personal status of the individual is recognized and enhanced.

Studies of ethnicity have shown that religious bonds form a powerful element in the makeup of ethnic identity, even for those who do not regularly engage in religious practices. A person who has little or no interest in the Scripture, worship, or moral instruction of any religion may nevertheless feel strongly that he or she is Maronite, Copt, or Orthodox, Sunni or Shi’i Muslim, etc. When the group perceives itself to be wronged or threatened, they can easily regard the offending group as the enemy and vent their anger against those members of the community who are nearest at hand, even if they be personally innocent of the offence. The use of religious symbols and terminology to reinforce a group’s self-identity and solidarity can give the impression that interconfessional conflicts are mainly about religion, whereas in reality the content or teaching of the professed religions may be opposed to the hate-filled deed undertaken in their name.

In parts of the world where religious profession does not imply confessional belonging or ethnic identity, the factor of confessional attachment tends to be underrated and misunderstood, and conflicts between confessional groups are dismissed as signs of primitive fanaticism. In societies that consider religious adherence to be a personal, individual decision implying no communal participation in a societal group, changing one’s religion or professing no religion implies no disloyalty or betrayal of one’s confessional relations, but where the identification with the confessional group is strong, leaving the group through conversion or intermarriage or failure to struggle for the common cause can be considered a type of confessional treason. Where the link between religious adherence and confessional identification is not strong, good relations between Christians and Muslims can be more easily maintained. This is not, as often stated, simply the result of secularization, nor is it a unique characteristic of secularized societies. It reflects, rather, a different understanding of the link between religious profession and responsibilities to family and group.

3. Power relationships. Tension and conflict between Christians and Muslims are often due to unequal power relationships in local communities. Almost everywhere the two communities live in relationships characterized by imbalances in their status as majority or minority, access to power, social influence and self-perceptions of sufficiency or vulnerability. One group or the other is almost everywhere more numerous, powerful, wealthy, or influential, and the community in relative weakness can never forget that their well-being - political, social, or economic - depends in many ways upon the good will of the stronger. Relationships of power and minority are often complex. One group may be more numerous, while the other has greater economic, social or professional influence beyond its numbers.

In some cases, factors of ethnicity and social status come into play, where followers of one or the other religion are identified with groups considered to be at the top or bottom of the social scale. These factors influence relations, for example, between the Christian majority and Muslim minority in the Philippines and between the Muslim majority and Christian minority in Pakistan. In countries such as Lebanon, Malaysia, Tanzania and Nigeria, where there is no clearly dominant majority and society is shaped by competing claims and coalitions between various groups, analysis of Muslim-Christian relations becomes even more complicated.

Christian minorities living in predominantly Muslim societies complain that they are treated like second-class citizens in their own nations and that they face forms of social discrimination in jobs, housing, and university admissions. They fear that the legal application of the shari’a will further marginalize their status in society and hence support secular-oriented political parties in any democratic system. Muslim minorities in Christian or post-Christian societies in the West feel themselves to be victims of racist attitudes, social discrimination, media antipathy and stereotyping as militant terrorists. Conscious of being a religious minority in the secular global village, Muslims express fear and anger at what they see to be cultural invasion and neocolonial domination.
Evidence for the importance of the factor of unequal access to power can be found by viewing Christian-Muslim relations in regions where both are minorities in societies dominated by a third religious or ideological system. This is evident in Asia, in nations such as Hindu India, Buddhist Burma, Thailand, and Sri Lanka, Confucian Singapore and officially atheist China, or in relations between Palestinian Christians and Muslims in the Jewish state of Israel. In these places, where both Christians and Muslims are minorities and outside the centers of power, communal harmony between the two is the norm, behavior is correct and sometimes warm, conflicts are few, and cooperation relatively easy to establish.

4. The burden of history. A final factor to be mentioned has less to do with politics, sociology, and demography, or any particular feature of Islamic or Christian faith, than with universal human challenges and failings. It concerns the burden of history and involves common human problems of how we deal with anger, resentment, frustration, and fear, how we react to suspicion and prejudice, and how we arrive at forgiveness and reconciliation. Just as Christian-Muslim relations do not exist in a sociological vacuum, so also they are not detached from their historical context. Each community can draw up a long list of the times and ways they have suffered and still suffer at the hands of others. Indignities and injustices are not forgotten and rise up again in later generations as causes or pretexts for reprisals.

Although they occurred almost 1000 years ago, Muslims have not forgotten the outrage of the Crusades, and the emotive power of these memories still colors their perceptions of Christians. Of more recent memory is the colonial period when for more than two centuries virtually the entire Muslim world was governed and controlled by a handful of Christian nations. The multiple indignities suffered in that period - the replacement of indigenous and time-honored ways of behavior with new and allegedly superior codes of government, law, personal conduct, and education, the paternalistic ideologies of the “white man’s burden” and “la mission civilatrice,” the economic exploitation, and the reduction of Islam to a “pagan” religion, are resonant memories that powerfully affect the ways that Muslims regard Christians today. Particularly hard to forget is the introduction of Christian missionaries that accompanied colonial rule.

Recalling such indignities, which occurred in the space of living memory, Muslims cannot relate to Christians today without the intrusion of feelings, even when well-concealed, of anger and resentment. Muslims cannot view Christianity simply as the teaching of the holy prophet Jesus, but rather as an active collaborator in a comprehensive system of oppression and cultural destruction that violated the dignity of their people. It is instructive to note that the pre-colonial Muslim polemics, such as that of Ibn Taymiyya studied in these lectures, generally lack the elements of outrage and anger that so often characterize modern Muslim views of Christianity.

It is too easy for Christians to say that this is all in the past. The colonial era would be easier to forgive if it were simply part of the past, over and done with. But the perception of many Muslims is that while the age of colonial rule is over, it has been replaced by a subtle and pervasive neo-colonialism. Many are convinced that the West is out to destroy Islam, an onslaught perceived to be carried out on multiple fronts: political, military, economic, religious, and cultural. The conviction that Islamic faith and culture are under attack, imperiled, threatened, explains many of the reactions among Muslims to recent international events such as the Gulf War, the Algerian conflict, and the continuing dramas in Palestine and former Yugoslavia.
Just as burdens of history bear on the way that Muslims relate to Christians, so also Christian attitudes towards Muslims are shaped by history. If Muslims retain vivid memories of the Crusades and the expulsion of Muslims from Spain, Christians preserve their own historical images of Muslims. From the legends of Roland to the Battle of Pristina and Fall of Constantinople, Saracen raids in the Mediterranean, the dev_irme system, the atrocities committed during the Greek War of independence and the massacres of Armenians, the image of the Muslim as bloodthirsty invader has become part of Christian heritage in Southeast Europe and the Mediterranean.

Christian historical memory in the Middle East is as complex as it is unhappy. If Arab Christians remember events in which they were victims of Muslim governments and armies, they also recall the 1099 Crusader Sack of Jerusalem when Eastern Christians, Jews and Muslims were butchered in the Holy City, and the devastating Sack of Constantinople by armies of European coreligionists in 1204. Through sharing the same religion, they have often been regarded by Muslims as allies of European invaders, collaborators of the colonial powers, and local promoters of modern liberalism, but Eastern Christians are also conscious of the ways they have been taken advantage of and utilized by their fellow believers of the West.

Christians in Asia generally make up younger churches exposed to the weight of a different history. Rooted in the missionary efforts of the colonial period, they are descendants of those who accepted Christian faith by conviction, often at great hardship, but also of “rice Christians” whose Christian commitment was compromised by material benefits such as promises of food, land, better education, health care, and social status. Becoming Christians did not save them from multiple indignities. They were denied posts of leadership in the church and regularly refused admission to religious orders. In mission schools they were forbidden to speak local languages and wear national dress. Christians in Asia are conscious that their neighbors regard them as a unwanted reminder of the colonial project, as people who have abandoned the ancient culture, traditions, and religion of the place and adopted, along with the “European” religion, a Western way of life, values, and expectations.

The concerns of these Christians revolve around basic necessities. Is preference given to Muslims in jobs, university seats, housing, positions in the civil service and military? Can Muslim preachers get away with public diatribes against Christianity, while Christians have to be cautious about any criticism of Islam or Muslims? Can blasphemy laws be used to settle scores and appropriate property? Do textbooks present Islam as the final, perfect religion and Christianity as a superseded, corrupt form of prophetic religion? Is it possible for Christians to play a constructive role in shaping society, or are they merely to be “tolerated” and “protected”?

In times of international crisis, when Muslim public opinion is indignant at the actions of one or another Western power, their anger is frequently directed, not at Western nations who are safely beyond their reach, but towards local Christians. Local Christians, who may or may not agree with such policies and who, in any case, have no power to influence them, are angry to be used as scapegoats in events over which they have no control.

In my opinion, it is these human factors which will be the strongest obstacles to good Muslim-Christian relations in the 21st Century. It is no more difficult for Christians and Muslims to move beyond the injustices of the past to arrive at mutual trust and reconciliation than for others. One need only think of the weight of the history of wrongs which Jews must face if they are to forgive and live in peace with European Christians. The anger of Koreans towards the Japanese or of black Africans towards both Arabs and Europeans show that collective resentment is a universal human phenomenon but for this reason no less important a factor complicating and hindering Christian-Muslim relations.

Put simply, the problem is, how can victims and victimizers both move beyond the past? Christians and Muslims are called to mercy and forgiveness by their faiths. Both the Qur’an and the Bible are filled with exhortations to compassion, pardon, and acceptance of others. We know that a deeply felt injury can become like a cancer of the spirit, eating away at an individual or a community until it can seem greater than our powers to withstand or overcome. Christianity and Islam, however, teach that we are not prisoners of the past, nor hostages of our present situation. It is possible to live together better in the 21st century than we often have in the past. It is possible to find ways to live together if, firstly, we do not minimize the problem and, secondly, if both communities are willing to look self-critically at our own histories. What Muslims and Christians can accomplish by living together in harmony and cooperating for the good of all is too important to be thwarted by the grievances and suspicions which form the burden of history.

1Norman Daniel et al
2Footnote on men and polemics?
3Tirso G
4Gregory and Djerba.
5Ya’qubi
6Biruni
7Ibn Hazm
8Baghdadi, Shahrastani, Razi
9Wolfson on Nestorians
10Shahrastani
11Ibn Hazm cites creed wo. filioque.
12Paul of Antioch’s Book of Sects.
13Iranshahri
14Citation from Ikhwan al-Safa
15Munajjid
16Ali al-Tabari
17Qarafi
18Razi
19Qasim, Ghazali, Baqillani
20Qasim, Jahiz, Abd al-Jabbar
21Toledoth
22Ibn Hazm on Paul
23Qarafi on Paul
24Said ibn Bitriq
25IT on Paul
26Amiri
27K. Din and Dawla
28Hasdai b Shaprut
29my book
30Nostra aetate, 3.
31Tarancon, cf. Islamochristiana
32Ref. to David Kerr’s article
33I.T. on isma’
34Fazlur Rahman, cited in dissertation
35ref. to dissertation
36K.Rahner, Sac. Mundi
37Rahner on general and particular hist of revelation
38Pope 09.09.98
39Ref. to Vat II
40Rahner on prophets after Xt.
41Ibn Taymiyya on din al-fitra
42IT on isma
43Schillebeeckx, Jesus
44Haight
45Cite IT on the amount of tahrif.
46Paraclete refs.
47Ibn Hazm
48Ghazali, Baqillani, Razi
49IT on wal-yahkum
50IT on tabdil
51IT on Said ibn Batriq
52My book, IT criticism of Sufis
53My book, IT on kalam
54My book, IT on philosophers and wahdat al-wujud (my article)
55Wansborough et al.
56I am indebted to the work of D. Madigan....
57Burton,
58Refer to my book on the Letter from Cyprus?
59Paul of A
60Abd al-Jabbar
61Baqillani’s Tamhid
62Lumen Gentium, 16.
63Pope in Morocco
64Pope in Rome
65Popecatechesis May 1999.
66WCC statement
67K Cragg reference.
68Trimingham ref.
69Wolfson
70Rahner on person
71“It is He who sent down the sakîna in the hearts of the believers, in order that they might add faith to their (existing) faith,” Qur’ân 48: 4. Cf. also, Qur’ân 48: 18, 48:4, 48:26, 2:248, 9:26, 9:40, 3:123. A Christian reader of these passages would spontaneously think of the Spirit. And how are we to interpret the enigmatic hadîth from Muhammad which says: “We have brought down the Qur’ân in a discontinuous form (fa_lan) and the sakîna in a continuous one (_abran)”? (*Check. Concordances ii, 494-495.)
72But not always, cf. Fazlur Rahman
73Check to see if Christiaan has written anything on divine presences
74Mahmoud Ayoub’s book
75Qarafi on redemption.
76IT footnote?
77Cite IT
78Aquinas
79Catechism of the Catholic Church, p. 599, 1994.
80I am deeply indebted to the writings of Gerald O’Collins for my understanding of these aspects of the mystery of redemption. The following works have greatly helped me.
81Kenneth Cragg