For three of my 27 years on diocesan staff, I had the attached duty of ecumenical and inter-religious affairs. It was great work. We had good relations with local Protestant and Latter-Day Saint communities; cordial discussions with local rabbis; and personal friendships with local Greek Orthodox and American Jewish Committee leaders.
With Islam, the story was different. Over the years, we had a total of two contacts: one letter from a local imam insisting that we convert, and one visit from a young, formerly Catholic imam eager to explain how all the good in Christianity was really derived from Islam, the (allegedly) original divine revelation. Alas for him, he picked an unreceptive audience.
I mention this for a reason. During those same years, I remember at least one night sitting through a parish presentation on the three “Abrahamic” faiths. In it, the parish DRE repeatedly, with the best of intentions, compared “the Bible” and “the holy Qur’an.” I then had the delicate task of explaining that, in Christian belief, the Bible is holy and inspired by God. The Qur’an – whatever its beautiful elements might be – is neither.
Christians do not recognize Muhammad as a true prophet. Nor is Islam the product of divine revelation, much less the original one. And the three “Abrahamic” religions – as Rémi Brague, Jacques Ellul, and many others have noted – have far deeper differences than similarities.
Simply put, inter-religious dialogue, including with Islam, is an admirable goal. But confused irenicism serves neither the truth nor a healthy mutual understanding.
Brague, the distinguished French Catholic philosopher and Arabist, describes the limits of Christian-Muslim dialogue:
For Islam, the survival of the Christian religion is an anachronism. Islam presents itself. . .as the true Christianity, given that, according to Islamic thought, Christians have disfigured the authentic Gospel, just as the Jews, for their part, have sold out the authentic Torah. Thus it is out of the question to appeal to common Scripture. This means, from the Muslim point of view, the “Islamo-Christian dialogue” is a dialogue between true Christians (that is, the Muslims themselves) and people who imagine themselves to be true Christians, but are not. This is why dialogue interests Christians more than it does Muslims.
In practice, Islamic ignorance of, and chronic disinterest in, the actual content of Christianity can be astonishing. Bernard Lewis, the great Jewish scholar of Muslim civilization, noted that over the centuries and into the modern era, most Muslims have believed that “the Trinity, the worship of which Islam condemns as near-polytheistic blasphemy, [consists] of God, Jesus, and Mary.”
Most Christians know that they don’t know Islam. But the opposite is not true. Most Muslims tend to assume that they already know everything they need to know about Christianity since the Qur’an speaks of Christians. The result is a gulf made unbridgeable by Islam’s claim to be the original, and the only pure, divine revelation, superseding all others.
None of this need preclude honest attempts at mutual respect and understanding. But it should preclude Christian naïveté. Catholics pray the Nicene Creed at every Sunday Mass. It’s the constitutional expression of what we believe. Across 17 centuries, men and women have died defending it. With the exception of the Creed’s first line, Islam rejects every key element of the text.
Historically, in Muslim-dominated cultures – as Rémi Brague notes, and we too often forget – “Jews and Christians were subjected to various measures explicitly designed to make them understand, by humiliating them, that it would be in their interest to adopt Islam.” Similar forms of Muslim behavior continue today. Christians face prejudice, persecution, abductions, and forced conversions in various Muslim states.
This week we mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Blaming an entire religious community for the actions of an extremist minority would be wrong. Nonetheless, in the wake of our nation’s 250th birthday, we might recall an observation by Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America: “I studied the [Qur’an] a great deal. . . .I came away from that study with the conviction that, by and large, there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. . . .[T]hough less absurd than the polytheism of old, its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared.”
Tocqueville’s words, written in a private letter to his friend Arthur de Gobineau at the time of French colonization of Algeria, are brutally harsh; but no harsher than earlier critiques of Islam by Saints John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas, among others.
Perhaps it’s best to end on some comments by St. John Paul II. Karol Wojtyla held more substantive meetings with Muslim leaders than all previous popes combined. And he approached Islam with sincere goodwill, without diminishing its differences from Christianity:
Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the [Qur’an], clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In Islam, all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside.
Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the god of the [Qur’an], but he is ultimately a god outside of the world, a god who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God with us. Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad. There is also mention of Mary, His Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason not only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity.
Sadly (in this case), beliefs have consequences. And for Christians, the cost of misreading Islam is bitterly high.
