An Introduction to Islam

I will soon teach an introduction to Islam at the church I currently serve as pastor. I have written this rather long introduction to Islam, and you might find interesting and useful.

Basic Facts About Islam

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

January 23, 2016

Size and Distribution: Islam is the second largest faith tradition in the world after Christianity. There are about 2.2 billion Christians in the world and around 1.6 billion Muslims. Indonesia is by far the largest Muslim country in the world with a population of nearly 205 million Muslims. Next come Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh in that order, each with between 145 million and 174 million Muslims. The largest Arab Muslim nation is Egypt, with about 79 million Muslims. Iran has about 74 million Muslims, Saudi Arabia about 25 million. Islam is a major faith in countries from Africa (mostly northern Africa but not exclusively that) to China, with major concentrations in the Indian subcontinent and Indonesia. Most Muslims are not Arabs though most Arabs are Muslims. There are about 3.3 million Muslims in the US, constitution roughly 1% of the US population.

Origins: Islam was founded in the early seventh century CE in the Arabian peninsula by the Prophet Muhammad. Muhammad was an orphan belonging to a small faction within a larger Arab tribe that controlled the city of Mecca in the western part of the Arabian peninsula. They were traders, and Muhammad led trade caravans across Arabia and into Syria before his experiences that led to the creation of Islam. He was protected, at first at least, by his people who ran Mecca and the Kaaba, the place of polytheistic worship in Mecca where the numerous tribes of Arabs came to worship without the fights and battles that usually characterized their relationships with one another. Muslim tradition says Muhammad was illiterate. That however seems unlikely given the work he did running trade caravans, which certainly required written communication and record keeping.

In the year 610 CE, while Muhammad was on a spiritual retreat in the hills outside Mecca, he had the first of his numerous visionary experiences that led to the creation of Islam and the Koran, Islam’s holy book. Muhammad continued to have these revelatory experiences for much of the rest of his life. Islam teaches that Muhammad would from time to time be essentially overpowered by God. Islam says that during those experiences, which apparently were quite unpleasant, the Archangel Gabriel recited to Muhammad messages that Gabriel had received directly from God, called in Islam Allah. Allah had been worshiped as the supreme God in Arabia before Muhammad, although Islam makes Allah the one and only true God. The word Allah isn’t God’s name. It is just the Arabic word for God. Muslim tradition says Muhammad memorized the divine words that Gabriel gave him in these experiences. Because tradition says he was illiterate it says that he didn’t write them down himself. It says that he recited them to a small group of followers, mostly family members, called the Companions. Some of them wrote down what Muhammad recited to them. Those writings became the Koran. Koran is an Arabic word that means essentially recite or recitation. Reza Aslan, from whose book No god but God I’m taking most of this information, says that the first revelation Muhammad received contained not radical monotheism but a teaching about Allah as a God of love and about social justice in Meccan society.

Radical Monotheism Eventually the revelations came to be about the truly radical monotheism that characterizes Islam today. The basic creed of Islam states “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is His Messenger” I’ll get to the Messenger bit shortly. Islam is fundamentally, radically monotheistic. In Islam God is a radical oneness, a unity with no variation or differentiation. Islam thus rejects the Christian notion of God as Trinity, as Three in One. For Islam God is One in One. Islam says that God was not begotten and has not begotten, begotten being the word Christianity uses to describe the relationship between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. Thus Islam has no figure in it anything like what Jesus Christ is for Christians. Jesus appears in the Koran, but Islam rejects the notion that he was himself in any way divine. Islam rejects anything that in any way detracts from the radical oneness of God. Muslims sometimes deny that Christianity is monotheistic, seeing our notion of the Trinity as a belief not in one God but in three.

In Islam God is said to have 99 names. They include:

Al-Khaliq, the Creator

Al-Rahman, the Merciful (the most commonly used)

Al Qudos, the Holy One

As-Salaam, the Source of Peace

Al-Razzaaq, the Sustainer, Provider

Al-Ghafoor, the All-Forgiving

Al-Wudood, the Loving

We Christians should find none of these names offensive. We think of God in those ways too.

Actually, Arabs say that God as a 100^th name too, but only the camel knows what it is. That’s why camels are so smug. I quite like that story.

Muhammad the Messenger of God: The basic creed of Islam, there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger, is often mistranslated. In Arabic that statement is La ilaha ila Allah, Muhammad razul Allah. The issue is the meaning of the word “razul.” It is often rendered in English as “prophet,” but it doesn’t mean prophet. It means messenger. It’s not that Islam doesn’t see Muhammad as a prophet. It does, but he is more than a prophet. In Islam a Messenger is one who brings a new revelation from God. It recognizes that there have been three Messengers of God. The first was Moses, who brought the revelation contained in the Torah. The second is Jesus, who brought the revelation contained in the New Testament. The third and final Messenger of God is Muhammad. He brought the revelation contained in the Koran. Islam believes that the first two revelations have been corrupted by the people who claim to follow them but that Islam maintains the revelation in the Koran pure and undefiled. No variety of Islam sees Muhammad as divine, and Muslims do not worship him. They worship only God. Yet Islam sometimes speak of Muhammad in ways that almost make him sound divine. He is the light of God. He is a pure human being. Some varieties of Shiite Islam (more about what that is below) call him the first of all of God’s creations, echoing rather clearly some things that Judaism says about the woman Wisdom in the Jewish Wisdom literature. Whenever Muslims speak the name of Muhammad they say “peace be upon him,” a sign of veneration but not actually of worship.

The early history of Islam: Mecca was Muhammad’s home and the place where Islam began. However, Muhammad’s emphasis on social reform and his radical monotheism were a threat to the powers in Mecca. It threatened their privileged position in society and their business interests by condemning the polytheism of worship at the Kaaba. In 622 CE Muhammad and the Companions left Mecca and moved to the city of Medina some 250 miles to the north. This event is celebrated in Islam as the Migration, and the Muslim calendar begins with it; but it wasn’t exactly an impressive affair. Muhammad and his closest followers slipped out of Mecca under cover of darkness to escape attempts by the ruling people of Mecca to kill them all. Medina is today the second holiest place in Islam after Mecca.

In Medina Muhammad consolidated a position of authority. There was a significant Jewish population in Medina, and at first Muhammad and his people got along well with them. To support themselves Muhammad and his followers conducted armed raids against caravans associated with Mecca, robbing from caravans being an age-old Arab practice. Different people understand what happened in Medina under Muhammad differently, but all groups of Muslims, however they understand it, see it as the ideal Muslim society.

Muhammad fought battles against Mecca from Medina. Eventually Muhammad more or less prevailed. He and his people retook Mecca, the actual taking of Mecca having been more or less peaceful. Muhammad did not take revenge on the people who had opposed and fought against him. Mecca became the center of Muhammad’s movement, which grew rapidly and spread from Mecca across the world. By the time Muhammad died in 632 BCE the entire Arabian peninsula was more unified and peaceful under the banner of Islam than it had ever been before. Eventually the Muslim Arabs established an empire, called the Caliphate, that stretched from Spain to Persia.

By the 10^th century or so the civilization of that empire was the most advanced in the world. Arab scholars made advances of world significance in science, mathematics, and other areas of intellectual pursuit. They gave us algebra (a word of Arabic origin) and Arabic numerals, including the concept zero. In Spain, which Muslims from North Africa occupied, Muslim, Jewish, and Christian scholars lived together in relative peace and worked together to create great works of philosophy and theology. Knowledge of Aristotle, which was revolutionary at the time, came into western Europe through Muslim Spain. The architecture of Muslim Spain is some of the most beautiful ever created. It still exists in the Alhambra in Granada. Christians, not Muslims, ended that time of peaceful coexistence between the world’s three great monotheistic faiths. They forced Muslims and Jews to convert to Christianity or leave the country. The function of the Spanish Inquisition was primarily to detect false conversions in people who continued to practice their former faith.

The Five Pillars of Islam: Islam is a much less doctrinal religion than is Christianity. Our faith has complex confessions of faith, and we consider what a person believes to be central to the life of faith. Islam has no complex confessions, and Islam stresses one’s actions and ways of living more than it does what one believes (but see the Sunni/Shiite split material below). Islam has no complex creed, but it does have a system known as the Five Pillars of Islam. Each of the five practices is a specifically Muslim variety of a universal spiritual practice. They are:

The Creed (shahadah).  “There is no god but God, and Muhammad is God’s Messenger.” This is the only creed in Islam. It sums up Islamic monotheism and Muhammad’s role in it.

Daily prayer (salaht)  One of the first things I ever knew about Islam is that Muslims stop whatever they’re doing, turn toward Mecca, and pray five times a day. Not a bad idea, actually, although I don’t know that I’d turn toward Mecca.

Almsgiving (zakaht)  Every Muslim has a moral duty to support charitable work. This obligation is enforced in some Muslim countries through a tax that all must pay.

Fasting (sawn)  Muslims fast from dawn to dusk every day during the month of Ramadan, one of the months of the lunar calendar used in Islam. There are exemptions from fasting for the young, old, sick, travelers, and pregnant or nursing women. The end of Ramadan is celebrated on a day called Id al Fitr, which is the biggest holiday in the Muslim calendar.

Pilgrimage (hajj) All Muslims who are physically and financially able to do it are expected to make a pilgrimage to Mecca at least once during their lifetime. Today the hajj is administered by the Saudis and involves enormous numbers of people every year. The hajj follows a fixed ritual that includes circling the Kaaba and sacrificing an animal in commemoration of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac. Many Muslims find going on hajj to be a life-changing, transformative experience. Sadly, the enormity of the crowd during the hajj has meant that there have been tragedies in which large numbers of people have been killed by stampeding crowds.

Muslim religious organization: Islam has no overarching institutional structure. There is something of a clerical hierarchy in Shiite Islam. There is none in Sunni Islam (see below for what those terms mean). Friday is a Sabbath day in Islam much like Saturday is in Judaism. Muslims gather at a house of prayer called a mosque for a service of prayer on Fridays. The prayer is led by a man (always a man) called an imam. Imams aren’t priests. They are more or less learned men whose primary function at the mosque is to lead Friday prayers. Friday prayer is not actually one of the five pillars, but it is a standard feature of Muslim religious life. Legal scholars called ulama play a significant role in preserving and interpreting Islam, but they are scholars not clerics.

The Koran: Islam’s holy book, the Koran (also rendered Qur’an in English), is not one of the five pillars of Islam either, but Islam is inconceivable without it. It consists of the recitations the Archangel Gabriel supposedly gave to Muhammad during his numerous visionary experiences. It is organized into 114 chapters called suras. The suras are arranged from the shortest to longest, a feature that I imagine makes the Koran harder not easier to follow and understand. The suras are designated as either Meccan or Medinan depending where Muhammad was when he received the sura. The Koran has been translated into many languages, but all Muslims are expected to read the Koran in the original Arabic. The Arabic of the Koran is said to be the most perfect, beautiful, poetic Arabic ever written. Verses from the Koran are often written in beautiful script and placed on the walls of mosques. You can see some of them in pictures of Hagia Sophia, the great church in Istanbul that was originally Christian but was converted to a grand mosque after the Turks conquered Istanbul in 1453 CE.

The Koran is understood to be literally the words of God. Muslims believe that Muhammad didn’t write it, God did. It contains not human words but divine ones. The origin of the Koran with God is orthodox Muslim teaching. It is not orthodox Christian teaching that the Bible originated with God in the same way Muslims say the Koran originated with God, although some very conservative Christians believe essentially the same thing about the origin of the Bible as Muslims believe about the origin of the Koran.

The Sunni/Shiite split: One of the most important aspects of Islam in the world today is the schism between Muslims known as Sunnis and Muslims known as Shiites. It is a division quite unlike the divisions within Christianity or Judaism, although it is often compared to the way Christianity is divided into so many different denominations.

The split originated with a disagreement within Islam about who should be the successor to Muhammad as the leader of the Muslim community, called the ummah. When Muhammad died in 632 CE the community chose a successor called a Caliph, caliph being an Arabic word that means successor. It chose Abu Bakr, a close associate of Muhammad’s but not a relative of his. Some people wanted to choose a man named Ali, who was Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law precisely because he was from Muhammad’s family. Abu Bakr survived Muhammad by only two years. The community chose a man named Omar as the second Caliph. He spread Islam beyond Arabia, but he was assassinated in 644 CE. The third Caliph was Uthman. He too was a son-in-law of Muhammad. He continued the spread of Islam as far as Libya in the west and Persia in the east. He was apparently a really bad administrator, and he was killed in 656 CE.

The fourth Caliph was Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of Muhammad whom some wanted to choose as Caliph upon Muhammad’s death. He was married to Muhammad’s daughter Fatima. He had two sons, Hassan and Husein, who become really important in the Sunni-Shiite split. He was opposed by a man named Mu’awiyah, the governor of Syria. Ali was killed in 667 CE. Seems like being Caliph tended to shorten one’s life. Mu’awiyah succeeded him after Ali’s son Hassan declined to take the post. He began a dynasty called the Umayyads that ruled until the mid-eighth century. He made his capital in Damascus, Syria. Ali’s second son Husein tried to seize the Caliphate from him, or maybe he was coming to join a rebellion against Mu’awiyah that had already begun and failed. In any event he was killed at the Battle of Karbala, in what today is Iraq, in 680 CE. Husein is the great hero of Shiite Islam. Shiites see him as a great martyr of the faith because he died opposing a Caliph who Shiites think never should have been Caliph in the first place because he wasn’t related to Muhammad like Ali and his sons were.

Islam today has many divisions within it, but the major one is between Sunnis and Shiites. The Shiites descend from a group called Shia Ali, or the party of Ali. The Sunnis trace their origins back to Mu’awiyah. Sunni is an Arabic word that means tradition. 80 to 85% of Muslims are Sunnis. They are the great majority in most but not all Muslim countries, including significantly Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. The Shiites are the majority in Iran and Iraq, although Iraq has a large Sunni minority. There is a Shiite minority in eastern Saudi Arabia, but most Saudis belong to a puritanical variety of Sunni Islam called Wahhabism. Shiite minorities in Sunni majority countries are often discriminated against and persecuted. The Sunni minority in Iraq is in significant conflict with the Shiite majority, a conflict that has played a major role in the rise of ISIS.

There are significant theological differences between Sunni and Shiite Islam. The two branches of Islam read the Koran a bit differently, the Shia reading it more mystically, looking for hidden meanings. One of the major differences has to do with people called Imams and someone called the Mahdi. The Shiites believe that only a true descendant of Muhammad can be a true leader of the Muslim world. They look to people they call Imams, supposedly divinely inspired descendants of Muhammad. Ali was the greatest of these Imams. Note that the word imam can mean different things. In Sunni Islam it means the prayer leader of a mosque. It sometimes means that in Shiite Islam too, but it can also refer to these special leaders. The line of true Imams ended a long time ago. Some Shiites believe that there were twelve of them. These Shiites are called twelvers. Others believe that there were only seven. They’re called seveners.

The seveners are particularly interesting and important. They believe that the seventh Imam didn’t die. Rather, he withdrew onto the spiritual plane of existence and is waiting to return to establish a truly just Muslim state. He’s called the Hidden Imam. These Shiites also believe in someone called the Mahdi. He is a Messianic figure who will come to establish peace and justice on earth. To me that sounds a lot like how some Christians believe Jesus Christ will be at his Second Coming. The Sunnis reject all of this belief as pure nonsense.

Husein is a central figure in Shiite Islam, but not in Sunni Islam. Recall that he was Ali’s son who was killed at the Battle of Karbala. He is Shia Islam’s great martyr. Shiites mark the day of his martyrdom as their major holiday. They believe that his death has consequences of atonement of sin that aren’t all that different from how most Christians think of the death of Jesus Christ, although they would never quite call Husein divine. Some Shiites imitate his sacrifice by beating themselves with chains to the point of drawing blood on the day the commemorates his death. Perhaps you have seen film of people in Iraq doing that as I have. Sunni terrorists have attacked Shiite worshippers on this day, especially in Iraq.

In the Middle East today Iran is a major Shiite power, and Saudi Arabia is a major Sunni power, although its Sunni Islam is stricter and more puritanical than is most Sunni Islam. There is great tension between these two powers in the Middle East today. We can I suppose understand that tension purely in geopolitical terms, but I think we miss an important aspect of it when we overlook the Sunni/Shiite schism that lies behind it.

There is a small branch of twelver Shiite Islam that is important today in the conflict in Syria. The ruling Assad family in Syria are what is called Alawite Muslims. Alawites are Muslims, but their faith has some syncretistic elements, including a teaching about three aspects of the one God, that sound a little bit Christian. The Alawites have always been quite secretive about their beliefs, so not all that much is known about them. Because Alawite Islam is a variety of Shiite Islam, Iran backs the Assad regime in Syria, and Saudi Arabia opposes it. So does ISIS, which is radically Sunni.

Jihad: We’ve all heard the term jihad. Most Americans, I suspect, think that it means something like Holy War. It doesn’t. Jihad is first of all an ordinary Arabic word that means struggle, striving, or great effort. Islam speaks of two kinds of jihad (struggle), called the greater and the lesser jihad. The greater jihad is the internal effort of every Muslim to be true to the faith and live the way the faith tells him or her to live. Islam knows as well as any other religion that living a life of faith isn’t easy. For Islam as for most religions that life is one of devotion to God, peace, love of family and others, and caring for God’s people. We all know that isn’t easy. The struggle to live that way is what Islam calls greater jihad.

Then there’s lesser jihad. Lesser jihad is the outward struggle, military or otherwise, against tyranny and oppression. The Koran never calls jihad holy. It calls it either just or unjust. One author (Reza Aslan) calls lesser jihad a sort of primitive just war theory. It says that war must be defensive and must not harm noncombatants. There are verses in the Koran that sound more aggressive than that. Aslan says that they are meant to apply only to the struggle between Muhammad and the Muslims in Medina and their opponents and their opponents’ allies in Mecca and Medina. I of course have no way to evaluate that claim. Still, I think it is most helpful to think of lesser jihad as a kind of just war theory.

Just war theory should not be unfamiliar to us Christians. Christianity has mostly preached just war ever since it became the official state religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century. Toward the end of the fourth or the beginning of the fifth century St. Augustine and others developed a Christian just war theory to take the place of Jesus’ teaching of nonviolence. After all, they thought, it must surely be permissible to fight to defend the now (nominally, I’d say) Christian Roman Empire. Christian just war theory says that a Christian may fight and kill in a war if five criteria are met. They are:

1. The war must be for a just cause.

2.      It must be defensive.

3. It must be declared by a legitimate state authority
4. It must use the minimum amount of force necessary to achieve the just end.
5. There must be no civilian (noncombatant) casualties.

I believe that this Christian just war theory is a betrayal of Jesus and his teachings, and I believe that it opened the door for Christians to be as violent as anyone else. Be that as it may, Christian just war theory is so similar to Muslim lesser jihad theory that I can’t help but wonder if the Muslim teaching were influenced by the older Christian one. After all, it was the official teaching of the state church of the Byzantine Empire (i.e., the eastern Roman Empire) in the years when Islam arose, and Byzantium bordered Arabia in those years. Some influence of Byzantine Christianity on Islam is, I think, only to be expected. I fear that lesser jihad theory has opened the door to Islamist violence much the same way that just war theory opened the door for Christian violence.

Sharia Law: Perhaps you have heard of Sharia law. Some irrational Americans rant about the need to prohibit Sharia law in the US and to prevent US courts from enforcing it. First of all, what is sharia law? It is a code of rules and regulations for how to live a Muslim life. The ulamas (legal scholars) interpret Sharia law for Muslim communities. There are several different schools of Sharia, but we needn’t bother with those for our purposes. It covers most aspects of life It is somewhat similar to how some Christian communities have regulated communal life through rules about behavior and dress, though it is probably more comprehensive. It does contain severe penalties for some violations of its provisions, especially those relating to sexual behavior. It forms part of the basis for the law in many Muslim countries, though its severe punishments are enforced mostly only in Saudi Arabia. There is no possibility of a US court enforcing sharia law. US courts apply, interpret, and enforce US law. The hysteria of some Americans around sharia law is totally unfounded.

Islam and Women: One of the things that troubles many of us about Islam is the way we think it treats women. It is true that many but far from all Muslim women wear the hijab (veil) or even the burka, a full body covering. That’s because Islam requires modesty of both men and women. Muhammad’s policies toward women were relatively progressive for his time. The lot of women in Arab tribal society was worse than awful. They were completely at the mercy of the men, who could marry as many women as they wanted and discard them at will. Muhammad said a man could have only up to four wives provided that he could properly care for all of them. In pre-Muslim Arabia there tended to be a lot more women than men because so many men died in inter-tribal battles, and every woman needed a man to take care of her. Islam insists that men and women are spiritually equal, but it also tends to specify different roles for people based on gender. Many Muslim societies are very conservative. In those societies generally speaking the public arena is for men and the home is for woman. Nonetheless, many Muslim women today are quite liberated. They practice professions and engage in business. Some Muslim countries including Turkey and Pakistan have had women heads of state, which is more than we Americans can say. Divorce is permitted in Islam but is discouraged. As with so many other aspects of Islam the role of women in the life of that faith is considerably more complex than to outsiders it sometimes appears to be.

Islam and Terrorism: If you get only one thing out of this session, let it be this: Islam condemns terrorism unconditionally, and no act of terrorism can in any way reflect the true values of Islam. It is true that the Koran is not entirely consistent in its sayings about violence, especially violence against infidels, that is, against non-Muslims. Yet for almost all of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims Islam is a religion of peace not a religion of war. Yes, people can proof text verses from the Koran to support most any position they want, but then we Christians can do and in fact do exactly the same thing with the Bible.

Consider this verse from the Koran, sura 5:32. I’ve heard Muslims cite it, sometimes without the “unless” clause, as the foundational teaching of Islam and as a radical rejection of violence: “For this cause we have ordained to the children of Israel that he who slayeth any one, unless it be a person guilty of manslaughter, or of spreading disorders in the land, shall be as though he had slain all mankind; but that he who saveth a life, shall be as though he had saved all mankind alive.” If anyone kills one innocent person it is as if he has killed all of mankind. A pretty strong condemnation of terrorism, don’t you think? And consider this: Islam considers suicide to be a great sin. I haven’t found any Koranic sura directly on point, but all the commentaries I have found on line say the same thing. Islam strictly forbids suicide and considers it a great sin. Yes, there are Muslims who engage in terrorism. They induce others to commit suicide. They kill innocent people. When they do they betray the great faith they claim to represent, and virtually all Muslims strongly condemn their actions.

A follower of a faith betraying that faith in the name of the faith shouldn’t be too hard for us Christians to understand. Christians do it all the time. Just war theory does it. Condemnation of people for being how God made them to be does it. Violence of any kind does it. Yes, some Muslims betray Islam in the name of Islam. That doesn’t make Islam inherently violent. Islam does not have the blanket prohibition of violence that we find in the New Testament (see my comments on that point below), but it strongly prohibits and condemns all unjust violence, suicide, and violence against innocent persons. In other words, Islam strongly prohibits and condemns terrorism.

Most but not all Islamist terrorists are Sunnis not Shiites. Perhaps that’s only because most Muslims are Sunnis, but in any case it’s true. Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS are all extremist Sunni organizations. They have all been heavily influenced by the Wahhabist Islam of Saudi Arabia. That’s a strict, puritanical form of Sunni Islam that arose in the eighteenth century under the leadership of a man named al-Wahhab. It is the Islam of the Saud family that rules Saudi Arabia. The Saudis have exported it to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The Saudi rulers have a somewhat ambivalent relationship to groups like ISIS because they were once themselves much like those groups, and those groups have been heavily influenced by Saudi Wahhabist Islam.

Sunni extremists like ISIS and al Qaeda despise Shiite Muslims as much as they despise secular westerners, or more. Many Shiites hate Sunnis almost as much as ISIS hates them. Tensions between Sunnis and Shiites explain much of the internal dynamics of Iraq. Under Saddam a Sunni minority ruled and had positions of privilege in a majority Shiite country. When we deposed Iraq we and our Shiite Iraqi allies drove most of the Sunnis out of the government and out of the army. Many of those people now fight for ISIS.

Islam, Judaism, and Christianity: There are three great monotheistic religions in the world. In order of their appearance they are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. There isn’t all that much similarity between Islam and Christianity except that they are both monotheistic and as they both relate to Judaism (and the similarity of lesser jihad to Christian just war theory). There is more similarity between Islam and Judaism.

These three great faith are all called Abrahamic faiths. That is, all three of them trace their ancestry back to the Hebrew patriarch Abraham. Islam teaches that Abraham build the Kaaba in Mecca. The great stories of the Hebrew Bible appear in the Koran. The verse I quoted above on killing innocent people, for example, refers to Israel and is from a consideration in the Koran of the story of Cain and Abel. The story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac plays a central role in the rituals of the hajj. The Arabs, most but not all of whom are Muslim, trace their lineage back to Ishmael, Abraham’s son by the slave woman Hagar whom Sarah drove into the wilderness to die but whom God saved. Certainly the most important similarity between Islam and Judaism is that both faiths are radically monotheistic.

Muslims call Jews and Christians all “People of the Book.” In the Muslim empires of the Caliphate and the Ottoman Turks people of the book had a special status. In those empires Jews and Christians were not discriminated against nearly as badly as Jews and Muslims have been in Christian nations. The Koran does not say that it is related to the Bible, but clearly it is. It has both Jewish and Christian characters in it, including Mary and Jesus. Islam doesn’t make much sense apart from Judaism. It’s radical monotheism almost certainly comes from Judaism. In all three faiths God is primarily a God of love. In all three God is also a God of judgment and of forgiveness. The Muslim God and the Christian God aren’t really all that different in how we understand that they relate to humanity and creation.

Some concluding thoughts on Islam: When I first began to study Islam several years ago I hoped that at the end of my study I would have a more favorable opinion of Islam than I had going into it.  By and large that has happened; yet Islam remains for me a puzzling and contradictory faith.  Let me begin with my favorable impressions before turning to some of the major things that continue to trouble me.

Islam is indeed one of the world’s great religions.  There can be no doubt that hundreds of millions of people over the last 1,400 years, have found the gifts of the spirit and an authentic connection with God through Islam.  It truly has the power to bring people peace, hope, joy, and courage.  If it did not, it would not be the great world religion that it is.  It is a monumental monotheistic faith.  It’s central confession that there is no god but God is a confession that we as Christians share with our Muslim brothers and sisters, as do God’s Jewish children.  The God of Islam is a God of compassion and justice.  Allah’s main characteristic is mercy.  We can rejoice that Islam provides a valid spiritual home for so many of God’s people.

Much of what Americans think they know about Islam is not true.  Historically speaking, Islam has been far more tolerant of other faiths than has Christianity.  Christians and Jews not only survived in the great Islamic empires—the Arab Caliphate and the Turkish Empire—they to some extent even flourished.  Their Muslim rulers never tried to eradicate their religions, although they did put restrictions on efforts to convert Muslims.  The same certainly cannot be said of the fate of Jews and Muslims in the various Christian empires over the centuries.

Again historically speaking, Islam is not necessarily anti-intellectual.  For five hundred years after the founding and rapid expansion of the faith, Arab culture was the most advanced in the world.  Arab culture produced some of the greatest philosophy, science, art, and architecture the world has ever seen.  Much of the heritage of ancient Greece, to which we in the West are so fond of tracing our own cultural origins, was lost in the West but preserved by the Muslim Arabs and introduced into Europe through Arab Spain, often in translations from the Arabic into Latin.

Turning to contemporary issues, there can be no question that Islam does not provide, and cannot legitimately be used to provide, any religious justification for terrorism.  Those who engage in terrorism in the name of Islam defame that great faith.  They are guilty not only of murder but of sacrilege.  In Islam, the use of force must be for defensive purposes only.  It may not be directed against innocent civilians.  Prisoners must be treated humanely and released as soon as possible.  Suicide is absolutely forbidden. 

Islam is flexible and adaptable.  It is the faith of hundreds of millions of people in vastly different cultures, from the deserts of North Africa and Arabia to the tropical jungles of Indonesia.  All Muslims share the central confession that there is no god but God, but they have very diverse cultures. 

All of that being said and sincerely meant, there are some things about Islam that I continue to find problematic and troubling.  One of the most significant is Islam’s teaching about its holy scripture, the Koran.  It is orthodox Islamic teaching that the Koran is literally the actual words of God.  This teaching does not mean that there are no differences of interpretation of the Koran within Islam.  There are. It seems to me, however, that it must limit the scope of scholarly inquiry into the origins and meaning of the book.  Source criticism, so important in understanding the Bible, cannot have much place in Islam, or so it seems to me, since God is said to be the one and only source.  Liberal Christians like me reject much of what the Bible says as representing not the will of God but representing instead ancient cultural understandings and prejudices that can no longer stand.  That approach would seem not to be available to Muslims since they must adhere to the doctrine that the Koran is the actual words of God.  I don’t see how this teaching can do anything but make Islam inherently rigid and reactionary in a great many respects.

The other major problem that I have with Islam is that, while it truly cannot be a basis for the kind of terrorism it is so frequently misused to justify today, it is not at its core a religion of radical nonviolence the way Christianity is, or at least was in its origins.  Jesus was a radical advocate of nonviolent resistance to evil.  Muhammad was not.  Jesus was a counter-cultural, wandering prophet and teacher.  Muhammad was that too, but he was also a military leader.  He led an army.  During the time he was in Medina, he led violent raids against Meccan caravans, and he eventually led a large army against Mecca itself.  Islam’s teaching on violence is not that it is necessarily wrong.  Rather, Islamic teaching on violence sounds like nothing so much as Christian just war doctrine.  It sounds so much like Christian just war doctrine that I believe it must have been heavily influenced by that doctrine, which would have been present in Arabia in the seventh century through Byzantine Christianity.  Just war doctrine is certainly preferable to an unlimited endorsement of violence as a tool of the faith, but the lack of a basis for an absolute rejection of violence in Islam creates problems.  When you say that violence may be used under proper circumstances to defend the faith, you have opened a door that it would be better to leave closed.  You open the door for al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS to claim that what they are doing is in fact defensive and therefore legitimate.  The discussion of terrorism must be conducted on the level of what is and is not defensive rather than on the more fundamental level of whether or not a person of faith can ever resort to violence.  This fact, I believe, makes it more difficult—not impossible but more difficult—for reasonable, faithful Muslim people to condemn the misuse of their faith to justify terrorism.  I say that with full appreciation of the fact that most, in fact nearly all, Muslims do indeed strongly condemn terrorism.  Nonetheless, Jesus’ “third way” (Wink) of creative, assertive, non-violent resistance to evil is the way of life and the way of the future, if the world is to have one.  I greatly regret the fact that Islam does not share that foundational teaching of Jesus Christ.