PETER S. writes:

In the preface to the Islamic scholar Carl Ernst’s valuable book, Following Muhammad: Rethinking Islam in the Contemporary World, he makes an astonishing statement:

 [T]he task of Islamic studies could.be described as minimal.  In 1992 I participated in a workshop discussing images of Islam in America.  The educational goal that we finally settled on in the workshop was very basic: to convince Americans that Muslims are human beings.  This might sound like an absurdly simple point, but the Islamic religion is perhaps the one remaining subject about which educated people are content to demonstrate outright prejudice and bias.  Ten years later a workshop on critical issues in Islamic studies came to the same conclusion, but more forcefully: the real issue is to humanize Muslims in the eyes of non-Muslims.  [p.xvii]

In this, as might be judged by many of the recent statements on this blog, he would appear to be entirely correct. 

The posted desire on this blog here, here and here to see the Koran burn stands in direct opposition to – among other authorities – the firmly expressed view of the Holy See, the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue having characterized such an undertaking as “an outrageous and grave gesture against a book considered sacred by a religious community.” Further, and curiously unmentioned on this blog, are the dark associations of such an act with such major and recent historical events as the Nazi book burnings of May, 1933, less than a decade prior to the systematic immolation of European Jewry. In perhaps double regard, the German poet Heinrich Heine, with remarkable prescience, wrote in his play Almansor (1821), lamenting the forced conversion of Spain’s Muslims to Christianity, “Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.” 

As for the meaning of such an act of desecration to Muslims, the burning of the Koran is not equivalent, in a Christian context, to the burning of the Bible, but rather to the immolation of Christ himself.  As Christ is, in Christian understanding, the Word of God incarnate, so the Koran is, analogously in Muslim understanding, the Word of God inlibrate.  In this regard, perhaps the most striking distinction between the Bible and the Koran is that God – and Christ as well – appears in the text of the former largely as a character – the First Person in the third person, as it were – while He appears in the text of the latter as author and narrator.  For Catholic and Orthodox Christians, who accept and believe in the RealPresence, this act of desecration would be most closely equivalent to the desecration of the consecrated Eucharistic Host.

It may be timely to here recall the formal judgment upon Islam reflected in the third section of the pontifical declaration Nostra Aetate (On the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions) of Pope Paul VI: 

The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems. They adore the one God, living and subsisting in Himself; merciful and all-powerful, the Creator of heaven and earth, who has spoken to men; they take pains to submit wholeheartedly to even His inscrutable decrees, just as Abraham, with whom the faith of Islam takes pleasure in linking itself, submitted to God. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere Him as a prophet. They also honor Mary, His virgin Mother; at times they even call on her with devotion. In addition, they await the day of judgment when God will render their deserts to all thosewho have been raised up from the dead. Finally, they value the moral life and worship God especially through prayer, almsgiving and fasting.

 Since in the course of centuries not a few quarrels and hostilities have arisen between Christians and Moslems, this sacred synod urges all to forget the past and to work sincerely for mutualunderstanding and to preserve as well as to promote together for the benefit of all mankind socialjustice and moral welfare, as well as peace and freedom.

Speaking more generally, the same declaration asserts:

 The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions.  She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men.

The Jesuit and Islamic scholar John Renard has reviewed the progress of Christian-Islamic dialogue in the decades following this pontifical declaration in his article Christian-Muslim Dialogue: A Review of Six Post-Vatican II, Church-Related Documents.  His related if somewhat dated article, A Contemporary Christian Response to Islam, might also be perused with benefit.  The most recent and also most promising development in this ongoing dialogue is A Common Word Between Us and You, a large-scale mutual exploration between Christian and Islamic scholars and religious authorities of the shared commandments of love of God and love of neighbour. 

The posted comparison on the blog here and here of Muhammad to Jesus, while understandable, is by no means unforced.  Muhammad was – according to Islamic understanding – neither an incarnation nor son of God, but rather a prophet, or rather a yet more specific type – a prophet-statesman.  As such, the most natural point of comparison is not to Jesus, but to Old Testament prophets such as Moses, David and Solomon.  Like these figures, Muhammad necessarily engaged in matters of statecraft, diplomacy, adjudication and war typical not only of such prophetic leadership but of political leadership generally.  In contrast, Christ was a leader of no polity save his small circle of disciples, his only political role as martyr to the Roman State.  Given this distinction, contrasting Jesus and Muhammad in such matters is at once misleading and unhelpful, even while serving certain polemical ends. 

If Muhammad is held alongside, say, Moses, comparison becomes at once more legitimate and straightforward.  For those who lay the critique of endemic violence at the feet of Muhammad, it may be helpful to recall such Biblical injunctions as those given by God to Moses in Deuteronomy, Ch.20, which includes such passages as:

 But of the cities of these people, which the Lord thy God doth give thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth:  But thou shalt utterly destroy them; namely, the Hittites, and the Amorites, the Canaanites, and the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites; as the Lord thy God hath commanded thee. [Deut 20:16-17 (KJV)] 

The God of Deuteronomy is, of course, none other than God the Father, the first Person of the Triune Godhead.  Although this same God is – on the basis of repeated Koranic insistence – the God Muslims understand themselves to worship, nothing of this severity appears in the Koran, which, on the contrary, bears injunctions against aggression in war and towards the cessation of conflict (tr. A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted): 

And fight in the way of God with those who fight with you, but aggress not: God loves not the aggressors. [2:190] 

If they withdraw from you, and do not fight you, and offer you peace, then God assigns not any way to you against them. [4:90] 

And if they incline to peace, do thou incline to it; and put thy trust in God; He is the All-hearing, the All-knowing. [8:61] 

If a comparison to Muhammad is to be found in a Christian context, it is to be found not with Christ per sebut rather somewhere midway between Christ and Constantine, who – in the most direct sense- made the survivaland eventual politicaldomination of Christianity possible, and who, unlike Christ, was fully bound up in the practical realities of political rule.  In this regard, it might be observed that the first Christian act of Constantine was war, when at the battle of Milvian Bridge – immediately following his conversion experience in which he saw a vision of the cross upon the sun, instructing “In This Sign, Conquer” – he defeated his rival Maxentius for control of Rome.  Politicalviolence would never thereafter be far from the concerns and practices of ostensibly Christian polities, despite the pacifist ideals of Christ, for the simple reason that the practical logic of governance has required this throughout human historical experience. 

If the life and prophetic career of Muhammad is actually studied, and here I would recommend the British Arabist Martin Ling’s masterful biography Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources– let me also mention in passing Ling’s other masterful biography A Sufi Saint of the Twentieth Century– what is perhaps most striking is the evident sincerity, piety and nobility of the man – completely at odds with the historical and contemporary Christian polemic against him – in relation to which it is perfectly straightforward to understand how generation after generation of Muslims could hold him in profound love and reverence, as described, for instance, in the noted Islamic scholar Annemarie Schimmel’s fine study And Muhammad Is His Messenger: The Veneration of the Prophet in Islamic Piety. 

There are a number of instances of magnanimity and interreligious goodwill in the life of Muhammad that might be noted, perhaps most remarkably the essentially bloodless conquest of Mecca, which concluded in a general amnesty to those Meccanpagans who had fought against him for decades.  His close amity with the Christian king of Abyssinia, in whose court a small group of Muslim émigrés sought refuge, serves as another example.  His drafting of the Constitution of Medina, which established rights and responsibilities encompassing the Muslims, Jews and Christians of that community, provided a template that was to inform future Islamic polities.  Another example, of direct relevance to Christians, was the charter of protection and privileges drafted by Muhammad on behalf of the monks of St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mt. Sinai, which has been consistently honored and which still exists, the text of which may be read here. 

To construct of Islam a vilified Other as found on this blog here and here is, of course, an activity with a distinguished pedigree in the West, a good overview of which may be found in the Islamic scholar Ibrahim Kalin’s article Roots of Misconception: Euro-American Perceptions of Islam Before and After 9/11.  Ironically – and as the preceding passage from Nostra Aetatemight suggest – what is remarkable is just how much religious, theological and historical common ground is shared between Islam and Christianity, so much so that the Islamic scholar Richard Bullient has argued in his work The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization that Islam may well be considered closer to Christianity even than Judaism, with which it is typically paired.  Further, the noted Jewish scholar Jacob Neusner has argued in the epilogue of the comprehensive study Comparing Religions Through Law: Judaism and Islamthat Islam and Judaism are so close in matters of theology, religious law and the integration of religion into the wider sphere of life – closer than either to Christianity – that they may be termed companion religions.  Thus, rather than speaking of the Judeo-Christian tradition – with Islam conceived beyond some outer pale – if one must hyphenate, the most natural pairings to speak of may well be the “Judeo-Islamic” tradition and “Islamo-Christian” tradition. 

The alienating, externalized view of Islam from the perspective of the West, while perfectly understandable, frequently results in a polemical caricature unrecognizable from a point of reference within the tradition itself.  In this, I do not mean to overlook or underplay that there is something rotten in the state of contemporary Islam – there clearly is.  The contemporary situation, characterized most visibly in the West by rigorist, extremist deviance from the classical Islamic tradition, has been treated in comprehensive detail in such works as Khaled Abou El Fadl’s The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists, Hamid Algar’s Wahhabism: A Critical Essayand Joseph Lumbard’s edited Islam, Fundamentalism, and the Betrayal of Tradition.  However, far from such extremism being broadly representative of contemporary Muslim attitudes, among the wide majority of Muslims worldwide “the most frequently cited aspect of the Muslim world that Muslims themselves say they admire least is ‘narrow-minded fanaticism and violent extremism’,” as reported in the recent comprehensive six-year global Gallup survey of Muslim attitudes and views: Who Speaks for Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think. 

The posted notion on this blog that classical Islamic civilization was barren of significant cultural achievement may be readily belied through a consideration of such works as Josef W. Meri’s edited Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopediaand Ian Richard Netton’s The Encyclopedia of Islamic Civilization and Religion; a less scholarly and formal treatment of many seminal Islamic cultural figures may be found in Michael H. Morgan’s recent work Lost History: The Enduring Legacy of Muslim Scientists, Thinkers, and Artists.  The further notion that classical Islamic civilization bequeathed nothing of value to the Christian West may be readily belied through a consideration of such recent works as George Saliba’s Islamic Science and the Making of the European Renaissance, Jim al-Khalili’s The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance and Jonathan Lyon’s The House of Wisdom: How the Arabs Transformed Western Civilization.  

That Muslims and Christians have been in conflict for a large portion of their shared existence is well known, but an emphasis on the purported history of endemic Islamic violence also obscures notable periods of coexistence, tolerance and exchange between Muslims and Christians as well as Jews, as explored in such recent works as Zachary Karabell’s Peace Be Upon You: Fourteen Centuries of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish Conflict and Cooperation. 

The posted comment on this blog regarding imprisonment for touching the Koran raises, of course, a very deplorable matter.  It should perhaps trigger a set of related questions:  Is this act reactive or radical rather than essential to the tradition per se?  Does it find precedent in the Koran, the Prophetic traditions or their legal codifications?  Is there a clear consensus of either historical or contemporary Islamic religious authorities favoring it?  Is the practice pervasive or widespread across the Islamic world?  If such questions as these are to be answered in the negative – as they are in the present case – then the conclusion should be that it is a caseof Muslims acting against or apart from the precepts of their own tradition and that the proper response – and the one typically followed by the Holy See, for example – would be to call them back to those precepts and away from such aberrations, rather than simply asserting that Islam is the worst of what Muslims do. 

To focus excessively on the vilification of Islam is to ignore the beam in the eye of the West: the riseof secularism and the consequent overturning of Christian religion and culture. The American Russian Orthodox monastic, Fr. Seraphim Rose, in his monograph Nihilism: The Root of the Revolution of the Modern Age – referenced previously in this blog – gives a penetrating analysis of the stages and consequences of nihilism in the modern era.  In a similar context, a recent essay by the American Evangelical philosopher William Lane Craig, The Absurdity of Life without God, details the terrible, often unrecognized, predicament of modern, secular man in the absence of objective meaning and value as imposed under a nihilist worldview.  Perhaps the most penetrating novelistic rendering of life under nihilism was to be offered by Fyodor Dostoyevsky in the character of Ivan in the The Brothers Karamazov, particularly in his parable of the Grand Inquisitor.

                                                    — Comments —

Laura writes:

This is a very long statement. And, I shortened it to make it manageable for this format.

I don’t think I or any one commenter here could respond to all of Peter’s points without running into a book-length treatise. Let me say this. Peter is right to be concerned about the demonization of Muslims. I understand his sincere alarm. However, I reject the idea that Terry Jones or this website have engaged in dehumanizing rhetoric or is preparing for genocide. It is an unjust charge. There have been no crude anti-Muslim slurs here, no pictures of rabid terrorists, no calls to burn all copies of the Koran, no support for burning even more than one copy of the Koran, no violent language against Muslims. There have been no proposals for defacing mosques or even attempting to close them. No one has said the many Islamic Studies professors in this country should stop working or that the magnificent collections of Islamic art and history in museums and universities should be shut down.

Terry Jones’s website does not feature dehumanizing or hateful language. He is a Christian missionary and has explicitly rejected aggression toward Muslims. Jones was making two points. One was political and the other was religious. His political point was that coercion in matters of religion is wrong. The threat of violence against Muslims apostates and non-believers amounts to a form of coercion. Regardless of how violent either Muslims or Christians were in the past, those who violate Islamic traditions for deferring to the Koran or to the image of Mohammad today do take their lives into their own hands.

At his blog, Jones wrote:

We are not against Muslims. They are welcome to be in America and worship freely. We do, however, warn that Muslims are not welcome to be in America without submitting to our laws. We are also well aware of the pressures Muslim communities place on neighbors, institutions and businesses to become ‘Sharia compliant.’ Muslims often expect a society in which they live to bow to the various laws of Islam, and put pressure on that society not to question Islam’s teachings. We have seen this happen in Europe. We warn that this pressure is not welcome in America.

This is not hateful rhetoric. Jones invited a local imam to his church center for a mock trial. No harm was done to the imam. He was not called names or abused in any way.

Jones’s religious point was that the Koran is false. The burning of Korans is not a good way to evangelize, but it is not something that is regularly done by Christian missionaries and it is very unlikely it will become routine or even common. Jones is not planning to do it even one more time. He saw it as an important symbolic act, an assertion that his faith is the one faith, something all Christians are obliged to believe. Peter refers to “the posted desire on this blog …. to see the Koran burn.” Perhaps I am wrong but his wording suggests that those here who supported Terry Jones were also advocating the immolation of the Koran everywhere. No one suggested any such thing. 

Peter mentions references here to imprisonment for touching the Koran with unwashed hands. A case of murder for touching the Koran improperly was also mentioned. These egregious acts are “very deplorable,” in Peter’s estimate, while the burning of one Koran in a non-Muslim country by a non-Muslim is tantamount to preparing for genocide of the Muslim people. Peter writes: 

Further, and curiously unmentioned on this blog, are the dark associations of such an act with such major and recent historical events as the Nazi book burnings of May, 1933, less than a decade prior to the systematic immolation of European Jewry.

This is very inflated rhetoric. It undermines Peter’s argument for caution, which is based on sincere concern that anti-Islamic hatred may become mainstream. The burning of books by Nazis was not “curiously unmentioned.” It was understandably not mentioned. The Nazis burned 25,000 “un-German” books in a single day in an effort to purge universities and libraries of   Jewish influences. Peter believes the burning of one Koran is comparable to an entire political establishment purging libraries of tens of thousands of books and preparing for mass exterminations. I don’t see the comparison.

Part of the reason why Peter believes this comparison is right is because he views the Koran as holy.  I understand that the Koran is more than a book to Muslims and to those who accept Islam. I would not want to coerce Muslims or Peter to view it any other way. But Peter believes all people are obliged to believe in one of Islam’s central tenets, that the Koran is an embodiment of God. The ecumenical pronouncements of the Church, when they amount to saying that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, are contrary to tradition and the very foundations of the faith. While the God of Christians and Muslims share many characteristics, they are not the same being anymore than two people who share things in common are the same person. These beings have acted differently in history. Their natures are different. No authorities of the Church can overturn the longstanding first commandment: Thou shalt not have strange Gods before me.

There is no way to affirm beliefs except by rejecting beliefs. A worldview, of necessity, seeks separation from other worldviews. Otherwise it ceases to exist.  It is true that the superiority of Christianity is asserted in the West, but then Christianity would not exist otherwise. There is no way to affirm except by rejecting. That does not necessitate violence. Here is an excellent statement by Kristor at VFR on the importance and meaning of separation, or the principle of exclusion:

The principle of exclusion is the principle of creation. In Genesis, God creates the world by separating things out from each other. He stretches out the firmament to separate the waters of this world from those of the surrounding ocean. He separates light from dark, day from night. He separates the sea from the dry land. He separates Adam from all the other creatures, giving him lordship over them. He separates Eve from Adam.

He separates Noah and his family from all their contemporaries; he separates the sons of Noah from each other, into all the nations of the Earth. He separates Abraham from his forebears, separates Ishmael from Isaac, Jacob from Esau; he separates the Samaritans and Galileans left behind in Israel from the Judeans taken captive in Babylon.

What is, is separate from all other things, or else it is not itself at all–does not really exist. What does not differ, is not. Separate comes from Latin separatus, past participle of separare “to pull apart,” from se- “apart” + parare “make ready, prepare.”

Without separation, there can be no parts, or therefore no whole, or therefore no participation, or any failure to participate: no sin, no virtue, no life, no death: no redemption.

And, obviously, if there is no separation between one nation and another, between one people and another, then they are, not two nations or peoples, but one. If two peoples are not separated, then one will disappear, or the other–or both. If we want to live at all, we must live just our own lives, in our own ways.

Separation does not entail discord; indeed, it is the forecondition of harmony.

Terry Jones was making the case for civil – and I do believe his burning of the Koran was undertaken in a civil fashion – separation from Islamic culture. This is what Muslims seek too. Wherever Muslims are serious about their faith or preserving their culture, they define themselves by making distinctions. They separate themselves from non-Muslims. Peter’s vision of a fusion of Christianity and Islam is anathema to Muslims, as it must be to any Christian who takes his faith seriously.

Peter is deeply disturbed by the burning of one Koran but his concern over the loss of life by those who express their apostasy or infidelity to Islam amounts to a passing observation that there is “something rotten in the state of contemporary Islam.” Terry Jones’s act was not revenge for that “something rotten in the state of contemporary Islam.” It was a symbolic assertion that a non-Muslim in America is free to express his religious views within certain reasonable limits.

Mosques are permitted in America and violence against Muslims as Muslims is extremely rare, if not non-existent. If one acquired one’s knowledge of Islam only from some anti-Islam websites, with their ghoulish pictures of terrorists, you would gain a very incomplete picture of the Islamic world. But in America, many people also come in contact with Muslims. Much of Europe today is Muslim. They are not molested.

The violent side of Islam is not the entirety of Islamic culture, as has been noted here before. But then no one at this site has advocated the destruction of Islamic culture, only separation from that culture so that the friction of attempting to reconcile the irreconcilable is not unbearable. Peter writes:

To focus excessively on the vilification of Islam is to ignore the beam in the eye of the West: the rise of secularism and the consequent overturning of Christian religion and culture.

Since the number of words at this site deploring the nihilism and decadence of Western society outnumber the words deploring the intolerance if Islam by about 40 to one, Peter’s warning of excessive vilification of Islam rings hollow. 

A reader writes: 

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