Encountering Islam

Christian-Muslim Relations in the Public Square

Sudworth

• Publisher: SCM Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780334055204
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religiöse Ökumene & Interreligiösität

What do Christian Churches say Islam is? What does the Church of England say Islam is? And, in the end, what space is there for genuine engagement with Islam? Richard Sudworth's unique study takes as its cue the question of political theology and brings this burgeoning area of debate into dialogue with Christian-Muslim relations and Anglican ecclesiology. The vexed subject of Christian-Muslim Relations provides the presenting arena to explore what political theologies enable the Church of England to engage with the diverse public square of the twenty-first century.Each chapter concludes with an 'Anecdotes from the Field' section, setting themes from the chapter in the context of Richard Sudworth's own ministry within a Muslim majority parish.

PART 1

CONTEXTS AND BACKGROUNDS

1

What do Christians Say Islam is? Formative Christian–Muslim Encounters

Having outlined some of the context for religion and public life and the particular challenges posed to the public square by Islam, there remains the Church’s fundamental task of identifying and locating the essence of Islam. As Jacques Waardenburg has said, ‘The first issue is simply that of identity: who are the Christians and the Muslims about whose relations we speak?’38 Because the originating story of Islam draws from the Christian narrative, it suggests that a historical perspective to this quest is necessary.39 If, as Sydney Griffith believes, Islam is a ‘template and foil’40 of Christian and Jewish religions, the earliest encounters between the respective faiths should contribute significantly to this question of identity.

James Sweetman notes some of the common worship practices of Christians and Jews in seventh-century Arabia, exhibiting a rich pattern of public faith recognizable among the nascent community forming itself around Muhammad.41 The perception that the original form of Islam was deeply shaped by the Christian and especially Jewish faiths has been more recently underlined by Gerald Hawting.42 It is perhaps not surprising then that one of the earliest Christian assessments, by John of Damascus (645–753 CE) in his De Haeresibus, attributes Islam as a Christian heresy. John of Damascus views Islam entirely through the lens of the Christian faith;43 as a distortion of the Christian tradition. The trajectory of revelation, initiated by God towards humanity in Scripture and through his servants the prophets, marks shared features of familial resemblance. The corresponding responsibility of humanity to a creator God, in humanity’s role as viceregent or steward, under the shadow of a final judgement, likewise posits Christianity and Islam as decisively missionary and global faiths, albeit with differently conceived ‘missions’.

John of Damascus provides us with an ambiguous admission of that family resemblance in his labelling of Muslims as ‘Ishmaelites’ and ‘Hagarites’,44 nomenclature that evokes a common heritage traced back to Abraham but also the derogation represented by Islam’s perceived waywardness. Ishmael is the son of promise but the fruit of Abraham’s unfaithful grasping; Hagar, the second-best bearer of covenant future. Whether one acknowledges ‘Hagarite’ as a Christian insult to Islam or self-styled indebtedness to Abrahamic roots, as Patricia Crone and Michael Cook have suggested, the title suggests something of what Kenneth Cragg terms the ‘de-ethnicizing’ nature of Islam.45 The followers of Islam are monotheists in the tradition and pattern of Hagar whose legacy runs as counterpoint to the aspiration of the ethnic nation in Judaism. Hers is a privilege that is not constrained by a territorial inheritance nor identified with a specific chosen people. Hagar, who was decidedly ‘not chosen’, did not bear the risk of a God invested in the prospects of a nation. Here one can see already an understanding of God that works to split divine providence from the vagaries of the human community. Therefore, at the origins of Islam there is the universalizing potential without the apparent ‘divine fellow-feeling’ of election intrinsic to the biblical tradition.46

However, it would be misleading to regard Islam as fully formed entirely in response to the Christian and Jewish faiths at the time of Muhammad. As Wensinck points out, it was over three centuries later that a coherent system of Islamic theology and jurisprudence became apparent.47 But if Islam was developing as a religion in contradistinction to Judaism and Christianity in this intervening period, the resonance of so many of the theological disputes to today is remarkable. The celebrated exchange between Caliph Mahdi and Timothy I, Patriarch of the Church of the East (728–823), results in a Muslim accusation that the Christian worships three gods and the innuendo that God had sexual intercourse with Mary. The mockery in the Caliph’s questioning of the Christian belief in the crucifixion of Jesus seems to point to a persistent thread that delineates the frontiers between Christian and Muslim theology to this day.48 In the Caliph’s rejection of the plausibility of Timothy’s faith is both an affirmation of that which is distinctive to Islam and a refusal to accept the Christian’s own self-understanding. The doctrine of God’s unity, tawhīd, prioritizes the victory and potency of God over any notion of suffering and vulnerability. In this economy, the Jesus that is prophet can never be Christ crucified. The Christian sees God’s unity in the self-giving love of the cross, however, and the incarnation as the creator’s generous and supernatural identification with his creation. For Muslims, these are beliefs that are refused by distortion.

Much as John of Damascus’ writings helped provide a Greek apologetic for Christians encountering Islam, Theodore bar Koni in his Scholion (c.792) was at pains to affirm the reasonableness of the Christian faith for Syriac-speaking Christians in the eighth century.49 It is evident from this work that Christology, the Scriptures and the crucifixion, with the all-pervading doctrine of the trinity, were vital themes needing to be explained and justified to Muslims. Michael Ipgrave believes that both Arabic and Greek Christians were forced to reflect on the hypostases of God in Christ the Word among their burgeoning Muslim neighbours in this period as central to the philosophical challenge presented by Muslims.50 Thus, even at this earliest stage, Islam’s acceptance of God’s immutability rejects the Christian inflection on this doctrine; an inflection that allows for an outpouring without which God remains ‘sterile in His inaccessible height’.51

The first known Christian composition in Arabic On the Triune Nature of God (c. 755) affirms boldly ‘that God and his Word and his Spirit are one God’52 as a clear rebuff to Q 4:171 with its accusation that Christians worship more than one God. This repeated recourse to the Christian orthodoxy of the trinity required the prior dismantling of misperception (idolatry) and highlights the significance of respective understandings of Scriptures. The New Testament account of Jesus’ death and resurrection, his embodiment of the fullness, as logos, of the creator God, let alone the Hebrew Scriptures’ covenant between YHWH and the Jewish people, are necessarily redundant to Islam. As Jacques Jomier observes, ‘For Muslims, Islam is not simply God’s final revelation but also God’s first.’53 The implications are that Islam does not merely supersede the Christian revelation but negates it ab initio:

What Jews and Christians now recognise as their scriptures do not coincide with the Qur’an, God’s full and final revelation. Since God’s word does not change, this lack of consonance must result from more or less intentional alteration or corruption of the text.54

In drawing from tradition to present itself as the original revelation, there is then, in turn, an abrogation of that tradition.

The inference in Islam that Christian and Jewish Scriptures are corrupted is reflected on by Peter the Venerable (1094–1156) and dismissed summarily as ‘a tradition without any foundation, and without proof, the author of which is unknown’.55 The essential dilemma is that the ‘inference’ that has produced this tradition rests with Muhammad and the qur’anic account of the Christian’s story.

Anthony O’Mahony proposes that there is a formative ‘objectively deficient understanding’ of the Christian faith by Islam and wonders whether that understanding can be rehabilitated within contemporary Muslim-Christian dialogue.56 There has been a tendency to blame that formative distortion on the confusion and sectarianism of the Eastern Churches in the seventh century.57 Sidney H. Griffith’s work, however, suggests a richer and more creative responsiveness to the challenges of Islam in the seventh century that retains the elevated Christology and trinitarian hue. For Christian apologists writing in Arabic, the inevitable consequence of the Islamic negation of the Bible as authoritative was an appropriation of Islamic idiom and even referencing of the Qur’an as support for the reasonableness of the Christian faith. The Summary of the Ways of Faith in the Trinity of the Unity of God, and in the Incarnation of God the Word from the Pure Virgin Mary58 reveals Christians utilizing the first phrase of the shahadah in the confession of their faith and the existence of ‘secret Christians’ whose Christology sets them apart from their Muslim counterparts. Even where Christian theological language accommodates to Islamic frameworks, the author continues to assert the doctrine of the trinity, believing that ‘once Christians have given way on this issue, the distinctiveness of their faith is eclipsed.’59 This picture of Christian contextualization, as opposed to syncretism, is reinforced by the Eastern, Arabic Christian theology of Theodore Abu Qurrah (c.755– c.830), who defends the practice of the veneration of icons from the accusation of idolatry by Muslims. The context was plainly one where Christians were accommodating their Christian worship to the external pressures of the Muslim community. Abu Qurrah provides a Christian theological justification in Arabic that is responsive to the questions raised by Islamic misunderstanding. In that sense, then, we have ‘the beginnings of Christian theology in Arabic’.60

The Arabic Christian milieu in the early Islamic period also witnessed the development of an apologetic in the idioms of Islamic discourse. For example, the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation were defended in terms of the Qur’an’s beautiful names for God.61 Almost without exception, though, the doctrines of the trinity and the incarnation were seen as vital beliefs to be conveyed as reasonable and in a language that was accessible to Islamic sensibility.62 This echoes the Greek Christian sentiments of John of Damascus for whom ‘the Muslim idea which separates from God that which is essential to His being and life, namely Word and Spirit, is a mutilation of God.’63

A popular Christian apologetic of the time, Kitab al-masa’il wa l-ajwibah (the ‘Book of Questions and Answers’), by Ammar al-Basri (c.850), deploys the idioms of Islamic texts and defers respectfully to the Muslim Caliph’s role in support of true religion.64 In laying this groundwork of cultural and political sensitivity, the question and answer format is used to commend the Christian faith’s inner coherence and logic at the expense of Islam. Contemporary Anglican articulations of the trinity as a basis for relations with Islam, configured contextually to Islamic interlocutors, will be seen to characterize two major lectures by Rowan Williams and be indicative of the ecclesial turn I propose, consistent with a wider canon of tradition.65

One of the earliest known...