Allah

A Christian Response

Miroslav Volf

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN:
  9780061927089
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062041715
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History

From Miroslav Volf, one of the world's foremost Christian theologians—and co-teacher, along with Tony Blair, of a groundbreaking Yale University course on faith and globalization—comes Allah, a timely and provocative argument for a new pluralism between Muslims and Christians.

In a penetrating exploration of every side of the issue, from New York Times headlines on terrorism to passages in the Koran and excerpts from the Gospels, Volf makes an unprecedented argument for effecting a unified understanding between Islam and Christianity.

In the tradition of Seyyed Hossein Nasr's Islam in the Modern World, Volf's Allah is essential reading for students of the evolving political science of the twenty-first century.

But in an age of religious conflict, how can two faiths with such different views of God find common ground?

• A Common God: Explore the provocative argument that Muslims and Christians worship the one and same God, moving beyond headlines and polemics to find a shared theological foundation.
• The Trinity and the Qur’an: Discover why a foremost Christian theologian argues that what the Qur’an denies about the Trinity is exactly what orthodox Christians ought to deny as well.
• Love and Justice: Examine the shared emphasis on a God who is both loving and just, and how these divine attributes provide a moral framework for living together in peace.
• Political Pluralism: Learn how shared convictions about God can foster a robust political pluralism where two faiths can coexist constructively under a single government.

Part I
Disputes, Present and Past

Chapter One
The Pope and the Prince: God, the Great Chasm, and the Building of Bridges

In February 2006 the global crisis triggered by the Danish satirical caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad was at its peak. Leaders of many nations and transnational organizations, including the secretary-general of the United Nations, Kofi Annan, felt compelled to speak out. Peace and security were threatened in many parts of the world. Toward the end of that same month, the leader of over one billion Christians, Pope Benedict XVI, spoke up as well. Like most other international figures, he aligned himself squarely with those who insisted that freedom of expression does not include the right of desecration. “In the international context we are living in at present,” he said, “the Catholic Church continues convinced that, to foster peace and understanding between peoples and men, it is necessary and urgent that religions and their symbols be respected.” Such respect implies, the pope added, that “believers not be the object of provocations that wound their lives and religious sentiments.”¹ Many Muslims felt that the most influential Christian in the world was on their side. But was he?

A mere seven months later, in September 2006, after the pope’s now famous speech at the University of Regensburg, the fury of some Muslims fell on Pope Benedict XVI himself. As during the cartoon crisis, at issue again was Islam’s denial of freedom and promotion of violence. Even earlier, in his statement against irreverent cartoonists and their mocking portrayals of the founder of Islam, the pope not only defended Muslims; indirectly and gently, he scolded the violent among them as well: “Intolerance and violence can never be justified as a response to offenses, as they are not compatible responses with the sacred principles of religion.” He was referring to Muslim rioting, killing, and burning in response to the caricatures (even as he left unacknowledged peaceful protests, like the ones in Mauritania²). In the same breath, he raised another issue. Respect for religion and for religious symbols, he insisted, requires freedom of choice in religious matters, or, as he put it, the right to “the exercise of the religion freely chosen.”³

In his brief statement about the caricatures, the pope demanded respect for religious symbols, condemned violence in response to desecration, and advocated freedom of religion. Many prominent Muslims agreed on all these matters. The pope and Muslims seemed aligned. So what broke the amity in the eyes of many? In his speech at Regensburg he picked up again, more extensively, the issues of religious freedom and violence and said something very different from his statement about the cartoons—or so many Muslims thought. An ally had turned adversary, and they felt betrayed and angry.

In the lecture, the pope seemed to argue that Islam is a violent religion and that the root cause of its violent nature lies in the character of the Muslim God. In scholarly prose, he made the same point Danish cartoonists made with satirical caricatures. As one Muslim commentator observed, he put “the caricatures into words.”⁴ That only two days before the lecture he once again urged respect for what is sacred to others rang hollow and self-serving in the ears of many Muslims, who saw the same disrespect in the pope’s reasoned disagreement as they did in the cartoonists’ satirical derision.⁵

The reaction of the “Muslim street” was swift and in many places extremely violent. As in the case of the Danish cartoons, a popular Muslim teacher, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, on the widely watched TV channel al-Jazeera, called for a “day of anger”—anger expressed, though, through demonstrations and sit-ins rather than violent attacks.⁶ Many heeded his call to anger, but not to nonviolence. The pope’s effigies were burned in Basra, Iraq; a Catholic nun was shot in Somalia; protests practically shut down the Kashmir Valley; and a branch of al-Qaeda vowed to conquer Rome, to “break the cross and spill the wine,” and prayed to God to be able to “slit their throats and make their money and descendants the bounty of the mujahideen.”⁷

Much more significant than the violent reaction of the extremists was a reasoned position taken by Islamic scholars (‘ulama)—the voice of authoritative and moderate Islam. First came a direct response, an “Open Letter” that contained a point-by-point refutation of the pope’s statements in the lecture about Islam from a group of the most renowned Islamic scholars of the day. Then, exactly a year later, came an alternative proposal, a highly authoritative and representative document titled “A Common Word Between Us and You.” It is addressed to Christian leaders worldwide, but is directed above all to Pope Benedict XVI. On the surface it looks like another interfaith missive from one group of religious dignitaries to another—the kind of text that elicits a yawn from ordinary readers. But behind the document stood a young and brilliant Jordanian prince, and it contained one massive surprise: a new proposal about relations between Muslims and Christians. In it some of the most senior Muslim religious leaders from all around the world—grand muftis of many nations, popular preachers with large followings, and scholarly authorities from places like the famed al-Azhar University—argued that the commands of God unite Muslims and Christians much more than they divide them. Properly understood, God does not widen the chasm between Muslims and Christians as Benedict XVI suggested, but bridges it.

Before exploring the “Common Word” and some Christian reactions to it, we need to look more closely at the pope’s offending speech. What did he say that caused such a stir—violence on some streets and a major alternative proposal about the relations between Islam and Christianity by leading Muslim scholars?

God and Democracy

Early on in the lecture, as a starting point for his reflection on faith and reason, the main topic of the speech, Benedict XVI reminded his audience of a fourteenth-century encounter between “the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both.”⁸ The emperor, ruler of a domain that by that time had shrunk to not much more than the city of Constantinople itself, had at one point issued a challenge to his interlocutor. It concerned the violent nature of Islam, especially as it relates to freedom of religion. He said: “Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”⁹ These words, when the pope repeated them, triggered an explosion of Muslim anger.

The emperor may be excused for his “surprisingly brusque” words, as Benedict XVI has described them. Though the conversation had taken place in 1391, the emperor had recorded it during the eight-year Ottoman siege of Constantinople lasting from 1394 to 1402. By that time the Turks had conquered Thrace and Macedonia and had won, in 1389, the decisive victory against the Serbian Empire in the battle on Blackbird’s Field. The minuscule empire of Manuel II had been a client state of the Turks since 1379 (and, by the end of the siege, the “empire” had paid the Turks the handsome sum of 345,000 ducats, roughly $47.5 million at the current value of gold!). During the siege, “hunger and desperation prevailed.”¹⁰ The sword of the Muslim Turks, deployed efficiently to conquer, subdue, and threaten, was in evidence everywhere. Who could object to a few brusque words by a powerless and besieged emperor about the evil and inhumanity of the mighty conquerors’ religion?

To many hearers and readers of the pope’s lecture, he seemed to make the emperor’s words his own. Though he did not have Manuel’s excuse—military, economic, and cultural power has shifted decidedly in favor of the West—rightly or wrongly the pope saw analogies between the situation of the Byzantine Empire in the late fourteenth century and that of the West today.¹¹ He distanced himself from some of the emperor’s comments,¹² most likely those that associate only “evil and inhuman” things with Islam. In his earlier book on the relation between Christian faith and world religions, Truth and Tolerance, he distinguished between “destructive forms” of Islam and those forms in which “we can perceive a certain proximity to the mystery of Christ.”¹³ But the Regensburg address as a whole suggests that, whatever Islam’s proximity to Christ, in its “inner nature” it also shows an undeniable connection to violence. Why? Not just because Islam is “a total organization of life . . . that embraces simply everything,”¹⁴ but above all because of Islam’s God.

In the dialogue between Manuel II and the learned Persian the most important words for Benedict XVI were not those that triggered the ire of many Muslims. Without any detriment to his main point, he could have easily left out the claim that Muhammad brought “things only evil and inhuman” into the world. His main concern was not even about Muslim violence, but about a deeper illness of which violence is a symptom—a profoundly mistaken idea about the nature of God, namely, that God is an unreasonable and capricious deity.

Benedict XVI zeroes in on the Christian emperor’s claim that, in a Christian as distinct from a Muslim perspective, violence in advancing the truth is incompatible with God’s nature. Drawing a contrast between Christianity and Islam, Manuel II said:

God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats. . . . To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death.

Now, as it turns out, Muslim scholars almost unanimously agree with the Christian emperor in affirming that faith is born of the soul rather than of the body. Just because of that, they insist, in the words of the Qur’an, that there is “no compulsion in religion” (Al Baqarah, 2:256.¹⁵ And even though both the ancient emperor and today’s pope think differently about Islam’s stance on freedom of religion, this too was not the pope’s main point. In the lecture, his main concern was the character of God.

In Benedict XVI’s view, Christianity is a marriage of biblical faith in God and Greek reason. The clearest demonstration of this marriage is the prologue of John’s Gospel. Echoing the opening line of Genesis—“In the beginning God created”—John begins his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the logos.” Logos, notes the pope, is both “word” and “reason”—“reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.” He continues:

John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God.

In Christianity, Reason is God and God is Reason. God does not just act reasonably; God is Reason itself.

In Islam, argues Benedict XVI, it is different. In Muslim teaching, “God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality.”¹⁶ So this, then, is the great contrast in the nature of the Ultimate Reality: the “God-as-reason” of Christianity stands over against the “God-as-pure-will” of Islam. The first encourages reasoning, deliberation, and persuasion; the second demands obedience and promotes violence. The “God-as-reason” of Christianity undergirds reasonable witness to one’s faith and deliberative political procedures; the “God-as-pure-will” of Islam undergirds the spreading of faith by the sword and the totalitarian rule of the interpreters of God’s will. In Benedict’s view, the conception of “God-as-pure-will” is at the root of the challenge that Islam presents for democratic institutions and cultures. The Muslim God is a completely arbitrary deity, and therefore Islam is incompatible with deliberative democracy.¹⁷

For one of the most erudite and influential Christian leaders of today, a chasm yawns between Islam and Christianity. The organization of social life is “completely different” in the two, and at the heart of that social difference lie two distinct understandings of God.

An Open Letter

The first major reaction of the Muslim learned tradition to the Regensburg lecture came as an open letter to Benedict XVI. In contrast to the fury unleashed by some on the “Muslim street,” the letter was a reasoned and measured response, point by point, to the pope’s claims about Islam. The stated intention of the signatories was to be governed by the injunction in the Qur’an about debating with Jews and Christians: “Do not contend with people of the Book except in the fairest way” (Al ‘Ankabut, 29:46).

First, the “Open Letter” takes up the claim that Muhammad commands faith to be spread by the sword. In his lecture, Benedict XVI mentioned the famous verse from the Qur’an that says, “There is no compulsion in religion” (Al Baqarah, 2:256). He dismissed it as coming from the early period of Muhammad’s life, when he “was still powerless and under threat.” This was superseded, the pope implied, by later instructions concerning holy war, which, he suggests, contai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction - The One God and the Great Chasm
• Part I: Disputes, Present and Past
• Part II: Two Gods or One?
• Part III: Critical Themes: The Trinity and Love
• Part IV: Living Under the Same Roof
• Epilogue - Reality Check: Combating Extremism
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright
• About the Publisher