Christianity
& Islam: Are We At War? By Father Mitch Pacwa, S.J.
There are a couple of things that we
have to understand at the very outset. The world for Muslims is divided
into two parts. First, the land of the people of Islam. Islam means
being submitted. So, the land where people are submitted to God.
Second, the people or the land or war. If a country has not submitted to
Sharia, the law of God as revealed in the Quran and Muhammad’s oral tradition,
then that land is not in submission and is a land of war.
This is a designation that
goes back to the time of the early kalifs (a title for any of the religious and
civil rulers of the Islamic world, claiming succession from
Muhammad). This is something we are dealing with in the modern
world. There are different types of jihad (a religious duty of
Muslims). The word jihad in Arabic means struggle not Holy War. We
have the interior struggle to submit to God. We also have the struggle
with those who are opposed to our religion. Finally, we have the struggle
to get others to convert to submit to God. Muslims have traditionally
dealt with all three.
Today we see the rise of new
movements in Islam. We are dealing with a level of Muslim terrorism that
we have not seen in the past. This struggle with jihad is affecting us
like it never has before. Where is this struggle coming from? It is
not new, though we have a new form of it. From the earliest days of
Islam, Muhammad himself engaged in violent struggle with his opposition.
He is from Mecca. His father died while he was still in the womb.
His mother died when he was about six or seven years of age. He was raised
first by his grandfather who died when he was eight. He was then raised
by uncles until he was mature. They sent him off to work as a
caravaneer.
Mecca was one of the most important
religious shrines in pre-Islamic Arabia. It still has today the shrine
called Ka’ba which was a pagan shrine with a variety of different
deities. Three principle deities were goddesses. The chief god was
Allah. He was the god of gods. He had daughters and apparently
wives. His three daughters were also worshipped at Mecca. Muhammad
would travel north particularly to Damascus which would bring him into contact
with Christians. He knew about other religions. Paganism bothered
him. He was known to be an honest and trustworthy man though he had a low
social status due to having no father or grandfather. Eventually he
worked for a Christian woman by the name of Khadija living in Mecca and they
eventually married even though she was forty years of age and he was twenty
five.
In pre-Islamic Arabia, wealth passed
through the women. One of the issues going on throughout the Quran and in
Islam was that Muhammad saw a changeover from the old tribal ways to a new way
in which the wealth goes from the man to his sons rather than through the wife
to the daughters. So this was a major cultural change which he
effected. While living with this woman, he had some visions in a cave
outside of Mecca. He was also influenced by one of her relatives who was
a monk.
This monk translated sections of the
Old and New Testament into Arabic. He made this available on an oral
level to Muhammad who could perhaps read a little though could not write.
He heard the stories of the bible through his wife and her relatives.
When he had the visions his wife encouraged him as she thought that he was coming
to faith in Christianity.
He began to preach a couple of key
concepts. First, he taught that there is only one God, that Allah is God, and
that any other gods being worshipped in Mecca were not God. Second, Allah
requires people to be ethical as he himself was. Third, God will bring
about a resurrection of the dead, therefore, you cannot live for this life
alone as the pagans were doing. Fourth, God will judge your behavior
before you are raised from the dead. If you are immoral you will be
raised to spend your time in Jehenum (a belief in Hell which is compulsory to
all Muslims). He gets this word from the New Testament and Christ’s reference
to Hell as Gehenna.
If you are a righteous person you
will be raised up to live in paradise. Paradise will be a place where
there are rivers underground that will be watering orchards with every kind of
fruit. There will be fountains of pure water, fountains of milk, and
fountains of wine that will not make you intoxicated. In addition, the
men will have the hope of having women every day and that their virginity will
be regenerated on a daily basis. This will be available to the men for
their pleasure for all of eternity.
There is no clear explanation for
what Muslim women can expect when they get to paradise. It is a part of
Muhammad’s teaching that most of the people in hell are women. He taught
this unsuccessfully from the time of the first visions until the Hijra (the
immigration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina). The death of his wife was
a significant blow to him as he was no longer under the protection of her
household. He was dependent on his own tribe which was alienating him
because he was speaking against the deities of Mecca which were the main source
of income for the caravans coming to Mecca. The various pagan holidays
brought in great pilgrimages and wealth to Mecca. By speaking against the
paganism and the gods being worshiped in the Ka’ba, he was undoing all of their
expectations for wealth in this life plus he was saying that life alone in this
world is not satisfactory. He taught that all would be judged and that if
they didn’t believe what he said they would be going to hell. Neither of
these options were very popular.
By 622 AD he was driven out of Mecca
and goes to Medina. This is an important point to understand because the
Quran will reference where particular chapters were composed. It is
important to pay attention to the fact of where the text was composed.
Once he had moved to Medina he began to engage in a new level of the struggle.
In Mecca he was too weak to stand up with great power and strength. He
was a meek man seeking to persuade people on the merits of his personal
authority or on the merits of the logic for what he was saying. When he
moved to Medina he was accompanied by all of the Muslim followers from
Mecca. There was a group of pagans living in Medina that converted to
Islam upon his arrival. They invited him to make this physical
move. They became known as the Ansar or helpers. These two groups
form a new power block in Medina.
Muhammad knew that there were three
tribes of Jews. Expecting that the Jews were monotheists, would welcome
him as a prophet, would recognize his authority, and would become Muslims
submitted to God because there was only one God. This did not
happen. The Jews opposed him. Muhammad instigated a series of wars
against Mecca. Sometimes the Jews would side with Mecca. As a
result, in one of the earlier wars he told one tribe of Jews that they must
leave Medina and to take their possessions.
In a later war, he told the second
tribe of Jews that they must also leave, though could not take their
possessions. The third tribe was not allowed to leave and the men age 12
and up were beheaded. The remaining women and children were made slaves.
Muhammad married at least one of them. For ten years this struggle goes
on for him in Medina before his death in 632 AD. When reading the Quran
and its message inciting people to violence, you can almost be sure that it was
written while he was in Medina. Yet another important point to understand
about Islam is that there is no official magisterium. So, everyone can
interpret the Quran the way they want to. Islam is a religion of peace of
the believer is focusing and centering their life on texts that Muhammad
composed in Mecca. Islam is a religion of war if one focuses on the
texts written in Medina.
The question for each Muslim is
which of the texts are they going to follow. The Quran is one book
separated into chapters called Suras each named after a particular theme in the
chapter. The Quran is also divided into 30 juz or sections. It is
tradition that each of the juz is read during a different day of Ramadan, a
month in the Islamic calendar. Here is an example of the text from Sura 4
a Medinan text. Verse 77 states, “Our Lord why have you ordered us to
kill?” In some translations the word kill reads “fight”. The proper
translation is kill. Seven times in the Quran it says “kill the
unbelievers”. In another text from Mecca, it states that “there is no
compulsion in religion.” Twice it states this. The question is
which verse does a Muslim follow. It is left to their personal
interpretation. Because of Muhammad’s ongoing wars with Mecca, he was
finally able to make them submit to him. They knew that he had gathered
an Army that they could not defeat. As a result, he became in effect the
ruler of all of Arabia. He killed some of his chief opponents that he
would not forgive. There are passages in the Quran that state that it is good
to forgive, while at the same time there are passages that justify the killing
of your opponent. Vengeance is acceptable. Which is
appropriate? It is up to you and your personal interpretation.
Muhammad was prepared to continue
fighting with the intent to attack the Byzantine Empire when he died in June of
632 AD. His father-in-law became the next kalif and continued the attacks
taking control of part of the Byzantine Empire and on into Egypt. Within
the first hundred years the empire had spread from Spain to Persia. In
this effort they did not persecute the Christians as they were not considered
to be unbelievers in traditional Islam. Christians are people of the book
and so are Jews. So, if Christians and Jews were willing to live
peacefully in a Muslim area and were willing to pay a protection tax called the
jizya, then they could be left alone. These Christians welcomed the
Islamic armies in their efforts to conquer the Byzantines because the jizya tax
from the Muslims was less than the Byzantine taxes. The advances for
which the Muslims were touted during this time frame were the result of what
they had learned from the Christians. The Nestorian Christians created
the university system that was replicated by the Muslims.
It was also the Nestorians that translated the Greek classics into Arabic. By the 13th
century the majority of the Middle East was no longer Christian, but
Muslim. Leaders within the Muslim world began to call for a more strict
form of Islam, eliminating the need for pagan philosophers like
Aristotle. At that point of rejecting Greek culture, Muslim culture
begins its decline.
Why are we today in this struggle
with Islam? First, the Turks were among the variety of conquering
movements within Islam. They are not Arabs. The Turks kept growing
their empire and began chipping away at Europe. In addition to the jizya,
they would also require a certain percentage of the Christian males of a
conquered district to become janissaries (elite infantry of the Sultan’s army).
They were forced to Islamize and became known as the most trusted. They
did not have any family ties to the Turks. They were former
Christians. They were radically loyal to the Sultan. They were
forced to fight other Christians as the Ottoman Turks continued their
expansion. Then there was the battle at Leponto. A small Christian
fleet defeated the Ottoman Turks in a battle they should have lost though won
through the intercession of Our Lady and the praying of the Rosary. The
Turks had sworn an oath to Allah that they would conquer Italy and make St.
Peter’s basilica into a mosque. It didn’t happen. What was more
significant to the Turks occurred 100 years later when the Christians defeated
the Turks following a failed attack on Vienna. From this point the Turk and Persian
empires start to decline and continue to do so.
In the early 18th
century, Peter the Great, tsar of Russia, begins to chip away at these
empires. The British seeing the Russian’s success and not wanting them to
get it all get involved taking territories in Northern Africa and India.
In World War I the Turkish Empire falls completely and the British and the
French get their chunks. As a part of the Sykes – Picot Treaty of 1916,
France gets Lebanon and Syria, while the British get Palestine, Iraq, and
Arabia. This completely changes the world and as a result we are today
still dealing with the effects of the fall of the Turkish Empire. This is what we are fighting to this
day in the Middle East.
Let’s study this further. Looking back to
the 18th and 19th centuries, there are two ideological
forces that come to the forefront that we are still dealing with today.
First, in 1740 a new movement of radical Islam starts. This movement is
referred to as Wahhabism. It was begun by Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab who
lived in Arabia. He was a mullah (educated in Islamic theology and sacred
law) that was rejected and ostracized by the other mullahs. He met up
with a man who became his military arm. He was from the Saud family from
where today the name Saudi Arabia comes from. Saud sons married Wahhabi
daughters cementing the alliance making the Saud family the military arm that
pushed the radical Wahhabi Islam that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab started.
This is extremely important for what
we are going through today because al qaeda is a Wahhabi organization.
The Wahhabi sect provides the ideology for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as well
as for al qaeda and other groups such as the Taliban, Muslim Brotherhood, and
groups in Indonesia, Pakistan, and other areas of the world. The Wahhabi
are the benefactors of the spread of Islam in central sub-Saharan Africa,
especially Nigeria. In addition, they are the main benefactors of the
largest Muslim mosques and schools in the United States.
A young man who was valedictorian of
his class at a Muslim school in Northern Virginia was accused of trying to
assassinate President Bush. This school was Wahhabi financed and run with
the textbooks coming from Saudi Arabia where the textbooks are required for the
education system from pre-school through graduate studies. This is true
for not just religious studies, though for all forms of study. A key
difference in Wahhabi Islam is their interpretation of content of the
Quran. Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab wrote a book entitled The Unity of
God. This book has redefined what it means to be an unbeliever. In
traditional Islam, the unbeliever is defined as a pagan or an atheist. In
Wahhabi Islam, it is taught that Shiite Muslims, Jews, and Christians are not people
of the book and that they are unbelievers or sorcerers. This is in
chapter 24 of The Unity of God. Therefore, these unbelievers can be the
object of this command to kill from the Quran. It is legitimate and even
the responsibility to perform these killings. The Wahhabi began to live
this out as early as 1790 under the direction of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab by
attacking the Shiites that lived on the coastal region of Oman and the
Emirates, as well as killing tens of thousands of Shiites in Kabbalah and
Najad, the same cities that we hear about today in the news. The Wahhabi
sect brought an army of Arabian Wahhabis into Iraq and began killing Shiites
throughout the country. They then took the army west up towards Damascus
at which point the sultan said enough is enough.
In 1900 Ibn Saud escaped from
imprisonment. He joins up with Wahhabi relatives and begins the conquest
of Arabia. He creates the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, named after his
family. He sets up the capital in Riyadh. He institutionalizes the
Wahhabi religion as the official form of Islam. He drives out the family
of King Abdullah. What do we call Jordan today? The Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan. The Hasimi family were in charge of Mecca and
Medina. The Saud family drove them out as non-Wahhabi. They
considered them heretics. So in the 1920s, the British created Jordan and
placed one of the brothers in charge. For another brother, King Faisal,
they created Iraq.
There is a second movement that we
must be familiar with to understand our current circumstance.
That is 19th
century nationalism. In the 1800s the idea of the nation state as
something greater than the individual, to which you must commit your allegiance
begins to take hold around the world. It replaces religion. Back in
the 1600s and 1700s religion lost its ability to hold people together in
Europe. Christians were fighting among themselves. So since their
faith could not hold them together, they turned to the nation. For
example, Otto von Bismarck forms Germany. Garibaldi creates Italy.
The idea of the nation being the great entity spreads throughout Europe.
This culminates in the Franco-Prussian War, World War I, and when you add
racism to it World War II. This idea of the great nation was also
exported to the various small communities in the Turkish Empire. For
example, The Lebanese began to say “we are the Lebanese Nation” – there was no
such place as Lebanon. Throughout the Ottoman Empire, people had not
historically thought of themselves as a Egyptian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Kurdish, or
Syrian. Rather, this was there tribal identity. The idea of the
nation did not exist until it is imported from Europe mostly by the Christians
that could speak the European languages. As a result, new tensions begin
to arise. One of the reactions is when the Armenians start to have a
sense of national identity.
The Turks take acts of reprisal and
commit the first acts of genocide in the 20th century, wiping out
1.5 to 2 million Armenians in an attempt to stifle their move towards
nationalism. When the Ottoman Empire falls, this nationalistic idea takes
over. Michel Aflaq forms the Ba’ath party in Damascus. This was a
nationalist party of Arabs that spread to Syria and Iraq. It became a
national socialist policy with Hitler’s Nazis. The Palestinians led by
the grand mufti of Jerusalem also take on this nationalistic idea and align
themselves with the Nazis. The grand mufti ended his time in the war in
Berlin. These nationalistic ideas formed the governments of places like
Syria, Iraq, Egypt, and the PLO. This creates the situation where the
government becomes more centrally powerful than ever happened under the Ottoman
Turks. These governments were investing themselves into private lives and
killing citizens in ways that Ottomans never conceived of. Modern
communications and modern arms made this possible.
The result of nationalism throughout
the Middle East was more oppression of the everyday person and collapse of the
nationalist system, so that now what we are seeing is that people are saying
that the idea of nationalism is a demon from the West. They believe it
was a way to get them to accept Western ideas. They now want to get back
to the way of life in accord with radical Islam. This is the situation we
see developing today. The reaction against nationalistic movements is
radical Islamic movements. This is true except in Syria and was true in
Iraq until the overthrow of Saddam Hussein where the nationalistic parties were
too repressive. The two centers for radical Islam are Saudi Arabia and
Iran. Ayatollah Khomeini developed a radical Islam for the Shiites and
the Wahhabi developed it for the Sunnis. They are in competition with
each other. The idea of them ever joining together is very unlikely
because they have theological and ideological differences that result in the
rejection of each other. It is a struggle to the death. The Shiites
and the Sunnis do not mix together anywhere. Where they have areas close
to one another, the boundaries are clearly defined. They cannot get
along. They are going to be at each other. When you are watching
the news and you hear that someone has blown himself up, it is almost certain
that this is a radical Islamic suicide. They expect from doing this that
they have given a testimony to Islam and therefore they will be welcomed into
paradise. Whereas, if you see that someone has killed others, though not
himself, that will be the nationalists fighting. They don’t want to die
as they do not have the same beliefs about heaven.
We are attempting to respond to the
dangerous situation. Some of the ways have been very foolish and others
somewhat effective. The idea of trying to build friendships is out of the
question. Trying to get everyone to just get along is not going to
happen. There are radically different ideologies fighting themselves in
the Middle East and they both agree to not trust the West. Trying to
ignore the situation to appease it will not work. In the past, military
defeat has worked. This is what stopped the Wahhabi in the 19th
century.
War, though leading to other
problems will likely be necessary to deal with this because for many of them,
this is the only language they understand. They have to be defeated
militarily. This is not easy to do with the type of warfare they engage
in. Ultimately, the issue is going to have to be resolved on another
level. A level that will change the way that people look at what they are
doing in this world and in the face of the changes happening in it. Is there
hope? Islam is in chaos.
A variety of forces within Islam is
trying to become the next kalif (a title for any of the religious and civil
rulers of the Islamic world, claiming succession from Muhammad).
They all want to be the next center for Islam. So do the
nationalists. All these forces are pulling on one another with no center
as a leader for Islam. Islam requires a totalitarian system to
survive. It does not survive well with authentic democratic freedom, when
people really have freedom of choice. It has to impose itself through
threats of violence a law called rida. If a Muslim leaves Islam and
becomes Christian, they must be killed. If you do not kill the convert to
Christianity when you could have, then you are subject to the law and must be
killed. They depend on that type of totalitarian mentality and political
structure. It cannot work any other way. If there were true freedom
of religion in the Middle East Islam would dissipate.
Today you cannot carry your own copy
of the bible into Saudi Arabia. Two Philippine women were beheaded
because they were caught with a copy of the New Testament. If democracy
can grow in the Middle East and if Christians can find their own identity and
find the sense of mission that is inherent to Christianity, it may be possible
to evangelize the Middle East so that it can once again become a Christian
region. This is a place where knowledge once flourished. Palestine,
Syria, Egypt, and north Africa were all once Christian. This needs to be
a goal of missionary activity for Christians.
How do we learn to evangelize
Muslims? How do we learn to preach to them Christ? We must be able
to have an ideological presentation of Christianity and the gospel. The
difference between Islam and Christianity is radical in terms of the way the
person is treated with dignity. This will raise their culture to a whole
new level. The way of public discourse would also elevate the culture by
the introduction of Christianity. We must teach the idea of requiring forgiveness
over revenge. We must teach that revenge is sinful even though some
Christians do it. We must also bring this to the materialistic culture
that exists today in Europe and America today.
These cultures do not have the
strength to stand up against Islam. What the materialistically minded
fail to grasp is that they will fall to Islam. If they think that the
Catholic Church or the pope or any other Christian resource has been oppressive
to their personal freedom, they haven’t seen anything about freedoms being
lost. This is already going on in Europe. Recently in Belgium there
was an effort to make Arabic the third national language. The goal is to
have Sharia Law in the streets of Paris. We must have a revitalization of
Christianity and from it deliver a Christian culture and mission. As
another sign of hope, in Indonesia, every year 300,000 Muslims become Catholic
every Easter. What is now East Timore, was once 95% Muslim when it was a
Portuguese colony. Once the Portuguese left, it has become 95%
Catholic. Hopefully this is the start of the spread of Christianity to
the rest of the Muslim world. It is up to us and how we let God use us in
this mission. This is winnable only if we are less materialistic and more
Christian.
