Muslim-Christian Views of One Another - Abdal Hakim Murad (Understanding Islam Series: Session 4)

any putative definitions it's a cricket term yeah it's an area of the the field the pitch just behind the batsman to his left every little corner of a cricket pitch of notes enormous has a stupid name anyway back to back to work and what I've been doing has been to attempt to outline the qur'anic understanding of Christianity both what Christianity was and what it should have been in the 'quran sphere and then tracing in outline the story of Islam's historic understanding of the Christian religion and I mentioned that it got off to a slow start that the early Muslims when they first encountered Christians they were basically on a lower civilizational level and when they started to debate with Christian theologians and places like Damascus they immediately found themselves outgunned because they knew no dialect to call Aristotelian logic which the Greeks and the Christians were deploying against them and in fact it's generally accepted now that the great trigger that kick-started Muslim philosophical theology was actually these early encounters with intellectually more advanced Christian thinkers that's what made Muslims get into systematic theology and then later on as Muslims became themselves more sophisticated you have people like Shiraz Danny and Riley producing in many ways at least for their time quite objective and factually correct accounts of the Christian religion what I want to do now is look at the story from the other side of the frontier what was the Christian understanding of Islam I've already mentioned that there was no scriptural foundation on which Christians could draw on the Quran mentions Jesus in Christianity the Bible doesn't seem to at least as far as Christians would mention Muhammad or Islam the initial reaction to the fact of the appearance of Islam and its extraordinary success in conquering half the world within a hundred years they were ruling from southern France to the west to the frontiers of China to the east and air a much larger say than Alexander the Great had ever conquered and massive Christian conversions coming in the initial Christian response was one of complete bafflement and bewilderment and of course a good deal of hostility and a good deal of theological agonizing after all if God had finally revealed himself and his will in history how could this sudden rolling back of inexorable divinely world Christian progress be interpreted what on earth is God playing at if the the fairest lands of Christianity Syria Palestine Egypt and so forth the great patriarchal centers of Antioch Jerusalem Alexandria and other places suddenly becoming Muslim this interrogated the Christian conscience and confidence about history in a very profound way and the result was a very very thick and angry and often hateful polemic that we find particularly from the Byzantine writers now the the first unambiguous record we have of this polemic comes from the great son John of Damascus and the early omayyad state was quite open to employing non-muslims and in fact he held high office he was the Minister of Finance for some years in the Umayyad State whose capital at that time was Damascus and that this seemed not to have hampered his polemical activities he was hobnobbing with the caliphs by day and at night writing polemic against Islam and they didn't seem to be a problem and he composes the first Christian book about Islam and it's called a discussion between a Christian and a Saracen and there are two volumes of this the two versions of this come down to us and he makes some fairly surprising errors about Islam and against scholars not quite clear how this could have happened if he was part of the royal court in Damascus surely he had an opportunity to learn about Islam and surely the Muslims would have ensured that he had that opportunity nonetheless he makes some very basic errors he inaugurates a very long-standing theme of christian polemic against Islam which continued right until the 17th century in that he said that Muhammad had been tutored by an Aryan monk view that has no historical basis whatsoever but it fits in with John's understanding of Islam not as a new religion but as a Christian heresy and for the Middle Ages until perhaps the 12th century that was the general Christian take on Islam not a new religion but a Christian heresy so he find an T for instance when he describes what happens to the Prophet in hell he puts him with Christian heretics like Pelagius and arias and so forth John goes on to assert that Mohammed can't have been real prophet because he didn't work any miracles and even says that the Muslims actually worship the blackstone which is this meteorite which is set into one corner of the Kaaba which marks the point at which the seven circumambulations begin Muslims of course don't worship it at all but he seems to suggest they do so the debate got off to a rather unpromising start but this initial contribution triggered a very large output of Arabic Christian writing about Islam John wrote in Greek but the Arabs soon followed now this is interesting because it was politically possible to do this there seemed to be no restriction in the early Muslim state on Christians writing very rude things about Islam and about the Prophet in fact Islamic law explicitly gives Christians the right to denounce the Prophet if this can be shown to be required by their theology nonetheless there had to be a certain circumspection and outside the dar al-islam the the world of islam we find a good deal of much more vituperative hostile demonizing literature about the Prophet Muhammad again that continued for at least a thousand years so we find the Byzantine theologians s const in their monasteries amount athos or n constantinople raging against islam and they were the first ones who said it wasn't a Christian heresy that was a false religion they said Muhammad was a false prophet inspired directly by the devil some of them said he's the Antichrist himself they said the Quran is a kind of mishmash of old and new Testament themes perverted by Manichaean notions and this really remained the consistent Byzantine position until final exception of Byzantium in 1453 in the Latin West the debate tended to be a bit more sophisticated although unfortunately it was no less vitriolic the tone was set by the great Christian thinker Peter the venerable who was abbot of the monastery of Cluny in France from 1122 until 11 56 and he is the first Western Christian to be concerned to write systematically about Islam he's worried was that the Crusades had failed to secure the conversion of the Muslims he complained that the Crusaders were only interested in massacring the Muslims or in driving them out and they simply didn't have any institutions or apparently any desire to convert the Muslims of the Holy Land so he launches a quite remarkable initiative and he travels around Spain to those towns that recently had been conquered from the Muslims and we're first-hand information about Islam could be found so here's a kind of doing fieldwork and you know you know pre-modern but but fairly responsible way and he generates what is today known as the cluniac corpus this is the first collection of Christian scholarly writings about Islam it's made up of yeah he came from this great monastery it's ruined now but it's worth visiting if you go to it's in the media the southern bit of central flats Clooney the great I think Benedictine house or a beautiful setting and piece of the venerable generated this cluniac corpus which was twelve books in Latin about Islam and one of these interestingly is the first translation of the Koran into a European language it's done into Latin by certain Roger of Keaton who is actually an English scholar Peter the venerable himself contributed two books about Islam one of which particularly influential one he called summer tortillas hey racist Saracen Orem a summary of all the heresies of the Saracens which remained a kind of set text for Christian studies of Islam for several centuries so we find this cluniac corpus being the basis of some thomas aquinas --is information about islam in fact one of some thomas' best-known works his Summa contra Gentiles was explicitly written as a kind of manual for Dominican missionaries trying to convert Jews and Muslims in reconquered Spain to to Christianity now his theory of Islam has the following four themes first of all Islam is false it is a deliberate perversion of the truth it is spread by a prophet who is a deliberate imposter number two Islam is a religion which can only spread by violence and sword number three Islam is the religion of self-indulgence the Quran Aquinas wrote permits fornication and sodomy and allows believers to break oh this number for Muhammad is the Antichrist now there's a truly great book about the medieval Christian understanding of Islam by somebody called Norman Daniel it's called Islam and the West is well worth looking at and he provides often very harrowing details of this kind of medieval Christian vilification of the Prophet particularly and he points out that the demonization of Muslims could in fact be even worse than the medieval demonization of Jews because the Jews were castigated only for their rejection of Christ's divinity whereas in the case of Islam to the same charge one could add a vitriol against the founder of the religion itself medieval Christians couldn't politicize against Moses Abraham and so forth but they could premise eyes against Mohammed so we find us this personal at hominin dimension added to the polemic did you have a question John yes I'm sorry sir yeah yes yeah yeah he says number one Islam is a false deliberate perversion of the truth and the Prophet was a deliberate imposter number two Islam is a religion that can only spread by violence and the sword number three Islam is a religion of sensuality and self-indulgence so that he thought that the Quran permits fornication and sodomy and allows believers to break ODEs and last but not least Muhammad is the Antichrist and that was obvious Aquinas is the great towering figure of medieval Christian intellectualism and this viewers was widely accepted until long after the throne a sauce now these accusations similarly to the anti-semitic accusations directed against the Jews legitimize legitimized large-scale religious violence against Muslim minorities who found themselves under Christian rule so the chief function of the Inquisition was the extirpation of the remnant of Muslim belief in Spain and some Dominic himself founded the Inquisition and Thomas of course was himself a Dominican um and this continues down the centuries in 1687 Ottoman rule in Hungary ends and the hapsburgs immediately bring the Inquisition from Spain into Central Europe and they do the same thing of forcibly converting Muslims and when they're found to be practicing Islam in secret they are interrogated and in some cases burned in 1552 Ivan the Terrible um captures the city of Kazan the great definitive defeat for Islam to the east of Europe and he immediately prohibits the practice of Judaism and Islam in his domain a law which remained in place in Russia you couldn't be a Muslim in Russia until the time of Catherine the Great who herself ran into the determined opposition of the clergy who thought that these laws should be continued and in fact until the Russian Revolution in 1917 it was illegal for Muslims to live in some Russian towns like the Chechen Kappa Negros nee Muslims couldn't live within 30 miles of the city and Kazan is another example if you go to what's left of the Muslim city of Kazan capital of Tatarstan on the Volga you'll find that most of Tatarstan is Muslim but the capital itself is Christian because Muslims are not allowed to live in in the city and it poses various electoral and political problems now that's the the mainstream of the story however is not consistently grim sometimes one can / demonize the traditional European persecution of the Muslims there were contexts in Christian Europe where coexistence did take place and which proved to Muslims that while intolerance might be practiced by some Christians it's not a necessary ineligible product of the Christian faith it's interesting that this year sees two anniversaries the first is the 900th anniversary of the sack of Lisbon formerly Muslim City by Crusaders who were sailing by and were invited by the King of Portugal - if they wanted to kill Muslims in the Holy Land they might as well do it near to home and so they suddenly turned up in the harbor of Lisbon overwhelmed the defendants and historians estimate that 200,000 people were killed there's been a spate of novels in Portuguese recently commemorating this a great Portuguese novelist called Saramago has written a book called the siege of Lisbon which has just been done into English if you want to see how the modern Portuguese conscience deals with this is painful anniversary so that's a depressing anniversary but just two months ago at the other end of of Europe another anniversary was celebrated by the president of Lithuania who attends the 300th anniversary of the founding of a mosque in the East of Lithuania and the five hundredth year of from the presence of Islam in Lithuania and he noted in his speech in this mosque how they'd always been good coexistence between the Lithuanians and the Muslim minorities never any persecutions etc which is more or less true the Tatar Muslims in the Baltic republics and in Poland whether a lot of historic mosques as well generally were very tolerated by the Catholic populations so this is a warning against seeing these things as inevitable the situation is more complex than that it's approximately 500 years since Islam became a Lithuanian religion but it was 300 years they were refugees from this place called Kazan the Golden Horde which was the great Muslim political presence in Russia was broken up by Ivan the Terrible some people went east and founded the Harnett of siberia and some went west and will give him asylum by that the Catholic kings of Lithuania and Poland and they're still something today in Poland for a while Luke Valencia had a second in command called Bogdan kopalski who is actually a Muslim polish background and there's a new mosque in Gdansk and so forth well the others that's a good question I think it was partly because the Muslims weren't very numerous and weren't seen as any kind of threat and also because they were refugees from the great Catholic rival to the East namely the wicked Orthodox and the Catholic kings of Poland and Lithuania were traditionally very hostile to Russia often for good reasons and so they were seen as as allies but they were accepted into the inner circle of the Polish court for instance traditionally the postal messengers of the Polish royal family will always muslims and tatars because they were great horse riders we've ever heard of steak tartare this rather strange raw beef the origin of this is said to be that the tatar horsemen on their great voyages across the russian planes didn't have time to cook their meat and so they would take a steak put it under the saddle in the morning and by the evening it was soft enough to eat and that's said to be the origin of steak - at our what it actually tasted like depends on how often they gave the force of are face to face anyway so these communities were relatively insignificant numerically but I think it's important to bear them in mind in case sometimes happens in dialogue context Muslims seek to tell all Christians with the same Russian said it was not possible for traditional believing Catholics for instance to tolerate Muslims sometimes it could happen what about the contemporary situation present-day dialogue between the three Abrahamic faiths while I mentioned earlier that since 1948 serious conversations between Muslims and Jews have been stalled until there's a final just resolution of the still lamentable situation in the Holy Land although there are contexts where there is dialogue between Muslims and Jews and I myself participated in them for instance in Oxford we meet twice here at the house of the Bishop of Oxford he presides and their rabbis their Muslims such as myself Christian theologians and one of the most consistent things to come out of these encounters which go on all day is that the Muslims and the Jews most always agree with each other on theological questions and the one or two things that we can't agree on but generally there's remarkable consensus and it's the Christians because of the the Trinitarian view of God that seem to be out on out on a limb so I mentioned this to show that there can be and there should be serious conviviality of discussion between Muslims and Jews but it's not as frequent as it ought to be Christian thinkers nowadays have in large part outgrown the medieval polemic in the mid 19th century the great quasi Christian Victorian philosopher Carlyle gave a speech in London attended by people like mrs. Gaskell and John Stuart Mill the intellectual establishment and he gave the speech on the subject of the Prophet as hero and he showed the Prophet Muhammad as a heroic figure as an alternative model of human perfection although he had some criticisms to make of the Quran nonetheless since Carlisle's time it has not been intellectually respectable in the West really to demonize the founder of Islam as traditionally was the case even in the 20th century you find some Christian theologians of a reactionary bent including perhaps the best known of all Carl Bart harking back to the old days Bart for instance once famously remarked that the God of Muhammad is an idol like all other idols nonetheless this is being left behind and palpably there has been a revolution but the key question in dialogue is always the status of the Prophet Muhammad the Old Testament prophets Muslims and Christians can largely agree about them Jesus well there were some areas of overlap in some areas of legitimate argument but what about the Prophet Muhammad and a major question that's being asked among Christians is is it possible to fit Muhammad into the divine pattern of salvation without dislodging the centrality of the of the Christ event of the crucifixion how can that work some Christian theologians have very bravely stated that yes in Ede Mohammed was a prophet one of the best-known of these was the Eden is the Edinburgh historian William Montgomery watt who has a two-volume biography of the Prophet he says for instance in 1991 there are grounds for holding that God was behind the appearance of Islam in order to bring something better to the people in other words Islam came into being not through human planning but by a divine initiative particularly significant from Montgomery what because he remains a committed Christian is actually an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland so this now seems to be possible although there's been quite a lot of criticism for more conservative figures saying that if you accept Mohammed as a prophet and surely you have to accept in some way the entailment of what he taught and how can you say he was genuinely inspired by God and then not follow what he taught and was doing what gets around this by saying that the Quran is only partly from God some of it comes from the divine some of it comes from the Prophet own mind so he compares the Prophet to Hosea the Old Testament prophet whose own experiences of his private life come into his contribution to the Bible um what goes on to make the very reasonable point that one of the most useful ways of judging the founder of a religion is the gospel from a principle of by their fruits you shall know them and he says if we apply this principle then the Christian appreciation of the Prophet has to be a positive one Islam has historically inspired great sacred literature superb uplifting works of architecture and allowed many men and women to achieve what has to be recognized as sainthood so Montgomery what is to be admired for all of this and his his representative of a certain strand of liberal Protestant theology that is concerned to to maintain the idea of the generosity and the justice of God in previous generations it was possible for Christian thinkers to say because the Muslims are such a demonic bunch of fornicators and devil worshippers and so forth they're going to go to hell but nowadays that nowadays Western to the virgins are recognizing that there's much of moral and spiritual value in Islam hence the idea that those people all going to go to hell are that they are following the Antichrist is no longer sustainable so it's more or less an inevitable product of ever of improved information on the Catholic side things have been more cautious but more systematic as perhaps one would expect one of the entailments of the Second Vatican Council was a radical revision of the traditional exclusiveness taught by the Catholic Church extra ecclesiam nulla Salus outside the church no salvation this is no longer accepted and a papal encyclical called Nostra I tarting which came in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council said explicitly that Muslims like Christians can hope for salvation very major revolution which given the hierarchical nature of the Vatican has managed to trickle down to parish level what about the Muslim side well in a sense Islam has less to amend here biggest the traditional polemic against Christianity in Islam was less sharp than the Christian polemic against against Islam um Islam has not reciprocated Christianity's attacks on its founder it can't because Jesus is so highly esteemed in the Quran Aslam has been less historically inclined to persecute other faiths so medieval Muslim cities like Cairo or Damascus or Cordoba were full not just of Muslims but also a flourishing Christian communities and Jewish communities and whereas in medieval Christian cities it was pretty difficult to exist safely as a Jew to exist as a Muslim or anything else was formally impossible we find for instance that when the first Ottoman embassy came to Britain in the rule of Henry the eighth they were forced to submit to baptism before they were allowed ashore at Portsmouth it was just inconceivable that there could be any Muslims in England there's another point here which is that historically Christianity has wished to dissociate itself from earthly politics Islam famously involves itself in earthly politics what are the implications of this for dialogue cannot be a common ground there are a number of Muslim thinkers most recently somebody called Sharia Akhtar who's a British Asian Muslim who have proposed perhaps ironically or whimsically that the crisps that the Muslim conquests of the Christian world were actually a blessing for Christianity why does he say this well he said in the Byzantine Empire the various Christian minorities were always fighting each other and being persecuted by the state as soon as the Muslims arrived on the scene that persecution ended so they should have welcomed the thing and that the most appropriate rulers for traditional Christians are in fact Muslims and it's true that we find that the monasteries immediately and no longer centers of political intrigue as they had been under the Byzantines and could get on with their more important purpose of nurturing human souls and imitation of Christ good example of this perhaps the most visually spectacular manifestation of Christian monastic parties is Mount Athos which is a promontory off the north coast of Greece and this superb summit of Eastern Christian spirituality which produced such um such spiritual movements within orthodoxy as the hesychast movement has about 20 monastery is still very much flourishing under Byzantine rule the abbot's were constantly complaining that they were being drawn into factional infighting um in the various imperial disputing in Constantinople different monasteries supporting different contenders for the throne in the 14th century it was ravaged many of the monasteries were actually burnt by Catalan mercenaries have been brought in by one of the claimants to the throne when the Ottoman Turks Muslims arrived in 1420 and Tripta holy mountain immediately it found peace and it became the non political backwater it had always tried to be new monasteries were constructed under Muslim rule the art of icon painting painting was resuscitated Sultan Selim the first in fact generously re endowed one of the monasteries and if you go to the monasteries and Panteleimon today in Mount Athos you'll see the interesting spectacle of Greek monks actually offering up prayers for the souls of the soul of Sultan Selim for having done this so for five centuries of Muslim rule the holy mountain lived in peace until nineteen in 1912 when the Greek army finally overrun it and the Ottomans left and just to close off this discussion of the traditional position of Christians under Muslim rule I've got a quote which is not sufficiently widely known which comes from the last Turkish governor of mount athos he was sitting in his little corn AK his little governor's house on the mountain not a very popular position for the Ottoman bureaucracy because no women allowed on Mount Athos not not even female animals are allowed there that's been the rule ever since that the Virgin Mary went there supposedly in the first century so he had to sit there and and and just rule and we have this account from a French journalist who was there interviewing him and he was sitting there puffing on his turkish pipe waiting serenely for the Greek police to come along and and arrest him to give a very interesting interview and I've translated a little bit of it which perhaps somebody could read you don't have again this is what he said to the journalist look around look at these thousands of bombs this is their eyes there's pressure on yourself of what we making plain have we touched their rules that we violated or Charlie have you forgiven their character images have altered even a little of their secular Constitution what grace I ask you what Carter through these people was great many greater moderation great religious tolerance under our law had made no less creed to need freer than under the Byzantine emperors the Apache who are under our domination 100 part of its Asian you close on relevance and France they assume we will regret our past Greece Russian serves Romanians altars all these months each other like poison they are bound together Holy Father econo-mode by this line and we are no longer there it will tear each other to pieces so that was the most impressive their role particularly in the Balkans these some Christians will be at each other's throats if it weren't for the generous some tolerant Muslims holding that the show together others the British perceived their role to be in India incidentally I should correct what I said earlier and one woman is known to have visited Mount Athos in the past 2,000 years she was an enterprising French journalist who went there in the 1880s and in order to carry off her disguise as a man successfully she had her breasts surgically removed before she went and she wrote an account of the holy mountain which and the libraries you can look at if you like but the rule today is still no women what I want to do in the last half an hour having talked about the historical interaction sometimes encouraging sometimes frankly pretty dismal on both sides is to look in more detail at the most central issues that invariably come up between Muslims and Christians and dialogue I've already talked about the problem that is really an internal Christian subject for Christian reflection on the status to be attributed to the Prophet Mohammed but the other things that invariably come up in these encounters relates to the understanding of God Islam and Judaism see themselves as upholders of the purely monotheistic Abrahamic conception mainstream Christianity has upheld a Trinitarian model of God which nonetheless holds to be an essentially monotheistic conception however the Muslims understood this well they're going to be a number of difficulties which beset any attempt by Muslims to define the Trinity Muslims hopefully with good will should attempt to see the Trinity as an expression a way of understanding the divine unity but how can they do this and one of the problems is that there are different Christian understandings of the Trinity in fact one of the key issues if not the key issue that divided early Christianity was Trinitarian doctrine reading the Muslim theologians one sometimes get the impression that some of them never got the point about the Trinity fully perhaps they were impatient with it there's an assumption amongst Muslim believers that ultimate reality has to be ultimately simple and that any attempt to introduce a plurality or multiplicity within the Godhead is so obviously absurd and a compromise with that principle that it doesn't really need to be investigated in detail but we also find amongst Muslim writers even in present times a quite sharp hostility that Muslims are very impressed by Christian ethics by the life of Jesus but they really don't like the Christian understanding of God and and there are two reasons for this I think firstly the doctrine of Trinity was the most notorious point at issue between Muslims and Christians it was rated with very fierce passions for the pre-modern Muslim mind the Christian world was always associated with aberrant violence these savages who lived to the north of the Mediterranean always fighting against each other and when they came to the Muslim world always brought crusades Reconquista and so forth that was the traditional Muslim stereotype of what Christendom was about and the idea was that the objective of all of this was to impose the doctrine of Trinity on the hapless Muslim victims it recalled even today amongst Muslims in Russia that when Ivan the Terrible took Kazan he told its people that they could only escape the sword by praising with us the Most Blessed Trinity for generation unto generation and even today in Bosnia the salute used by Serb regulars is that that's the salute that you'll see them waving on the top of their tanks which is the traditional Serbian symbol for the Trinity which is the old gesture of defiance against Muslims so a lot of Muslim theologizing about Trinity has not been able to be particularly objective it's always taken place against this very powerful polemical background of a fear and often outside hatred the Trinity as the very symbol of the violent unknown other to this distortion I think one has to add some problems implicit in the doctrine of the Trinity itself Islam although it's produced great thinkers as nonetheless tended to put fewer of its epistemological eggs in the theological basket than has Christianity what I mean by that is that the great intellectual enterprise of traditional Christianity was always theology that was where the bright people went that was the queen of the sciences and the universities in the Islamic world and also I think for most pre-modern Jews theology was important but a lot of great minds also went into areas such as law and jurisprudence and also into mysticism so one finds in Muslim presentations of the Trinity as I said earlier this is this sense of impatience and that the idea framed at the Council of Nicaea in 3:15 that God is actually made up of three persons one of those persons is further subdivided into two natures namely the divine and human attribute of Christ but all of these somehow resolve to authentic unity that seemed rationally very dubious to Muslim theologians and also seem intuitively wrong God as the final ground of all being simply has no need of being so complicated I can't ultimately ultimate reality be ultimately simple so these are two obstacles to a correct understanding of the Trinity first of all the historical political background of fear and mistrust and also a kind of Muslim impatience with over elaborate metaphysics there are sophisticated metaphysical thinkers in Islam but as I said the great thinkers have tended to gravitate towards law and towards mysticism somebody have a question I thought I saw a disembodied arm waving gone hallucinating and now these two obstacles to some extent do persist today however they have been dissolved to some extent and but a greater and more recent problem is that the traditional diversity of Christian understandings of the Trinity which always made a Muslim understanding of the central jewel of Christian theology traditionally understood much more difficult namely that the pluralism that the plurality of Christian ideas of the Trinity has actually been exacerbated one of the central debates of Christian theology in the past 100 years has been the Trinity itself once again it's it's it's in center stage and the old Caledonian consensus however fragile about the Trinity that was shared more or less by Catholic and Protestant theologians the Orthodox have their own their own views which differ somewhat that has now been lost and so Muslims looking at the incredible richness and often brilliance of contemporary Christian theological output can simply be bewildered what is now the normative Christian understanding of of God what do Muslims actually say then when they confront this this literature and invariably these are the points that get raised in dialogue first of all Muslims recognize or should recognize that there is hardly any tenets of Christian theology or even morality which does not depend ultimately on this doctrine of the Trinity a lot is at stake for traditional Christian orthodoxy the fundamental dogma of Trinity doesn't make any sense unless you also accept the doctrines of incarnation and atonement Sint Anselm in his famous book Deus homo shows that the concept of atonement demanded that Christ had to be God since only an infinite sacrifice could atone for the limitless evil of humanity which isn't Augustine but it was a matter damn not a humanity as a damned mass because of Adams original sin so infinite is the sin of humanity in classical Christian theology that only an infinite sacrifice can atone for it hence only God Himself can do it man cannot dig himself out of this mess so Jesus of Nazareth was hence God incarnate walking on earth distinct somehow from God the Father who remained dwelling in heaven and hearing our prayers and his prayers so it became necessary to think of God as at least two in one who were at least for a while existing both in heaven and on earth as distinct entities so the baby in the Bethlehem cradle is unbeknown to his on lookers also directing every detail of the cosmos in early Christianity that the logos the word which was the Christ spirit believed to be active as a as a principle as a divine principle in human life in due course also became high pasta sized as the third person of the Trinity and hence the Trinitarian doctrine which was affirmed particularly Cal seeding in the fifth century and no doubt this process was shaped I the triadic beliefs which hovered in the near eastern air of the time many of the late Roman mystery religions also believed in a triune deity also some of them believed in a divine atonement figure and Mithras for instance is an example of this and these are their arguments that Muslims would would deploy when looking at the agility Aryan thesis now when I look at the evidence for this process I have to say that I'm probably not qualified to say whether the arguments being advanced are coherent or not because I'm not a biblical scholar and New Testament scholarship in particular is one of the most heavily populated and and brilliant domains of modern scholarship it's calculated that a new book a new scholarly book on the New Testament is published every 20 minutes if you can believe that and one of my colleagues in Cambridge the professor of New Testament complains to me that she simply can't keep up with all of the new often very brilliant books that are being produced so if she can't do it I certainly can't and I'm not sure how how authoritative my pronouncements are going to be but as a layman it does seem that a kind of consensus is beginning to emerge amongst serious historians preeminent amongst whom are figures such as professor gather their mess in in Oxford who's the expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Britain that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed or taught that he was in any sense divine that he was a second person of a divine Trinity he was a wandering charismatic rabbi very much a product of and in harmony with the Galilean tradition of first century Palestinian Judaism this is what Professor venomous has said in his book Jesus the Jew and it's very widely accepted not just by British theologians and New Testament people but also in the States and we have people like Professor Burton Mac for instance at Claremont in California yeah professor gather Vern am SES several books once called the religion of Jesus the Jew 1hs called Jesus the Jew is the third one I can't remember he's also the most distinguished translator of the complete Dead Sea Scrolls and though gays are very missus positioners as I said that Jesus of Nazareth himself as historians can make up simply regarded himself as a prophet in the Jewish tradition but would certainly never have seen himself as being divine that was something that came into Christian belief subsequently as the result of the infiltration of Hellenic ideas of a human being being God simultaneously which was the idea for instance that underpinned the Roman Empire Roman Emperor was also God God incarnate and there are various incarnation is sects or popping up all the time in the 1st and 2nd century and Vera mrs. thesis which is as I say widely shared was that Jesus the monotheistic Jew was eventually swamped or veiled by the influx of Gentile converts and the paradigm for whom is of course Paul who took him out of his Jewish context and held him up as some kind of quasi divine Savior figure so that Jesus himself if it wandered into say a great Byzantine Basilica and looked up at the mosaic of the christ pantocrator' ever the altar simply wouldn't have recognized himself though it was a transformation that took him completely outside the bounds of what he himself imagined himself to be very mess in particular has been deriving his views from his studies of the Dead Sea Scrolls which are our principal source of knowledge for first century Palestinian Judaism the NAG Hammadi Gospels those so-called Gnostic Gospels are also useful not that they shed reliable information on reliable light onto the beliefs of Jesus but because they illustrate the sectarian ambience of the I'm I'm also archaeological work that has been done that the growing up strengthens Bernice's thesis and he also uses the the New Testament itself and Burton Mack who's taken Vanessa's views a little bit further is interesting because Mack holds that Jesus actually had a scripture and he identifies this with the source that is used by the authors of the synoptic Gospels Matthew Mark and Luke referred to and by the initial Q there's so much that is shared by those three writers that for at least a hundred years scholars have recognized that those three writers had a common source from which they were borrowing so John's Gospel is a different type of document altogether and generally held to be somewhat later so Burton Mac in his recent book the lost gospel actually reconstructs this book that Jesus had and taught from called Q now why do I mention all this well because I think it heralds a possible new and more hopeful chapter in the sometimes dismaying story of Christian Muslim dialogue what can be the Christian response to these new discoveries to this new image of Jesus the Jew well there are two basic responses that one can observe the first is that advocated by the great German theologian hood of Bultmann who said that okay we know that Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure didn't really see himself as God incarnate but that doesn't matter because God Himself is inspiring the church the image of Jesus that was intended to be taken and to inspire the church and subsequent humanity was the image that has been traditionally read into into the New Testament and so although the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith demonstrably are two different figures it is the latter that we should be taking seriously as the basis for our Christology and through this maneuver which not everybody regards as particularly persuasive he can actually justify the retention of the entire Caledonian and poor line theology the other response of course is to take the new discoveries seriously and to grasp the nettle and to say that the traditional Christian views about Jesus the old Christology was framed on the basis of information that we now know to be flawed the modern New Testament scholarship the Qumran discoveries the Dead Sea Scrolls and so forth no longer allow us as responsible objective historians to cling to the views developed by 3rd 4th century Greek theologians who simply didn't have access to this material Burton Mack is a distinguished American advocate of this thesis so also is Professor Robert Eisenman who recently published a book on James the brother of Jesus Eisenman's point in this huge 800 page tone is that the early Christian community divided into two and that the brother of Jesus James is referred to in the Bible as brother of the Lord and Protestant certainly except of Jesus did have brothers and Catholics don't because of their doctrine of them of the perpetual virginity of Mary that the original disciples of Jesus and the early Jewish Christians remained in Jerusalem continued to worship in the temple and retained their loyalty to Mosaic law whereas in Paul when he traveled out to the Jewish Diaspora and eventually converted Gentiles as well introduced Greek styles of of religion deified divinized Jesus and this was the reason for the tension which we know even from the epistles of Paul existed between him and the Jerusalem Christians and Eisenman goes on to point out that in the year 70 when the temple was sacked and Jerusalem was razed to the ground that the original Jewish Christian community in Jerusalem was more or less wiped out although we find people like the Ebionites in the first second century and as late as the fifth century who continued to believe that to be a Christian you had to be loyal to the Jewish law as Jesus himself had taught but following the destruction of the temple the initiative in Christianity shifted to the new Gentile believers who rejected the law didn't see the need for circumcision although respect for the Jewish dietary laws and so forth and that became the form of Christianity that eventually prevailed in history and was imposed by the Byzantine Empire let's Eisenman's view it's also upheld by somebody called unbound Haim who's a French scholar who provoked quite a bit of controversy in Catholic circles in France a couple of years ago and he produced a book also called James the brother of Jesus which makes the same point and it's a very good case and many Christian theologians are now figuring out what the correct response should be some such as the British thinker John hick have said the old images of God and of the Incarnation have to go clearly they are historical product clearly it is illegitimate to project these Greek ideas back into the mouths of the very Jewish Jesus we can retain Christianity but we need to see the Trinity as some kind of symbol poetic metaphor rather than a realistic description of the divine nature and John hick other theologians such as Don Cupit and some Americans to some extent somebody called Paul knitter has been doing this as well have been charting a post Trinitarian Christology which ties in of course with what the Unitarian movement has been saying for some years anyway now I've talked about this in some detail because I think it is going to determine the tenor of Muslim Christian relations in the decades to come and the new millennium and I think it's very hopeful sign because this great stumbling block between Muslims and Jews on one hand Christians on the other namely the idea of the Incarnation which Muslims simply can't digest God cannot in here in anything he has created ears outside the world transcends the world if that doctrine is jettisoned if the Trinity is reformulated in regard to just as a rather than a literal statement well then it really isn't too much to divide Muslims and Christians and a new era of understanding and dialogue can hopefully unfold something I wanted to close on often these discussions still proceed in mainstream theological circles without sufficient reference to their entailments for concepts of gender and partly because of the several female colleagues I now have in Cambridge I've been forced to acknowledge that many of the historic injustice is imposed upon women have had theological and Christianity's case Christological justifications in America in particular there has been a group of very articulate challenging women theologians rosemary Ruth of being the best-known of them who have said that it is profoundly alienating to modern women to worship a male God the Trinity according to Ruth and the very considerable and following that she now has is alienating to women in anything like its traditional formulation because it's so male centered and as another American Mary Daly has said if God is male then the male is God this seems to be an entailment that there is a primacy attaching to the masculine principle in the very nature the very ground of existence and this can be used to justify every other inequality that has unfolded in in history the Trinity has not just God the Father but also got the son God has chosen a male vessel for the Incarnation and the Virgin Mary is regarded increasingly as a rather ambivalent figure as I mentioned earlier because of her passivity and her saintliness as a product of her negation of her specifically feminine possibilities of motherhood so how does Islam fit into this and what are the implications for this of the new still rather tentative trend in Christology well one of the things John hick does is to point out that immediately religion becomes more accessible and less alienating to women if this traditional Trinitarian language is set aside or poeta sized God the Father is a concept that a lot of modern not just women but people generally cannot accept because it does seem to impute gender to the divine who should transcend that so we find for instance even in liturgy now the Lord's Prayer is now being amended our Father who art in heaven a lot of women find this difficult and there's a new inclusive language lectionary produced I think by the Episcopalian Church here very widely used which amends this and tries to get the father out of the equation I think that the rather infelicitous alternative they propose is a view to whom as loving children we belong which gets around the gender specificity but them perhaps sounds somewhat sententious and absurd that's being used in a number of churches this is a live issue what John hick is saying what ruther is saying is that we need to redefine God so as not to attribute gender to God and where this ties in interestingly with Muslim theology is that Islam never did that in the first place one of the differences between the characterizations of God in the Bible and in the Quran is that the Koran does not call god father the divine 10z the divine transcendence a word which we'll be discussing in more detail next week God has utterly other transcendent beyond description beyond comparison precludes any attribution of gender to God really or metaphorically interestingly - there is a kind of ambivalence about the agenda of the divine that you find in some of the head viii literature and also in the quran itself God is described as Allah most frequently which doesn't really look like a male or a female none in Arabic although it's although it's treated grammatically as male because there's no neuter but there is this frequently occurring word for the divine man the all-compassionate of all loving and at the beginning of the quran and get these words bismillah al-rahman al-rahim in the name of God the compassionate the merciful so this is how God chooses to describe himself right at the beginning of the Quran now Rahman is interesting because the Prophet himself said that this name has been derived from Rama each took got amina rama and rama is Minoru him and rah-rah him is the arabic word for a womb a Rahman is God in the creative aspect why did God create the world according to the Muslim mystics well it wasn't because he needed to as such but because of his compassion Muslim mystics say that he looked out upon the possible things that could exist that were crying out to him in articulately for him to bestow upon them the blessing of existence and because of his Rama his compassion he breathed out and the world was born and this is called anitha al Rahman that the breadth of the compassionate God that's another way of seeing the created world Muslim mysticism the breadth of the compassionate God is what the world is and Rahim has a specifically womb-like connotation as I said it's the usual Arabic word for womb and so some of the theologians explicitly averred that this is a feminine possibility within the divine God's engendering his maternal bringing into existence of of the world we also find in a number of hadith the concept of Rama sketched out more fully one of the points that sometimes arises in Muslim Christian debate is that Christianity is a religion of love Islam and Judaism religions of the law and this stereotype can also be tackled by looking at this term it's conventionally translated as the compassionate however is not a very good translation if we look at the hadith we find that something more intimate more warm more loving more maternal it's definitely implied a famous hadith describes how when the Prophet finally conquered Mecca and there was a scene of absolute confusion people running everywhere fearing a massacre which of course didn't occur he and his companions spotted a woman young woman who is running around crying my child my child because she'd lost her baby endure in the crush and then she found the child and picked it up and hugged it to her breast and the Companions of the Prophet was so delighted to see this this beautiful scene that some of them even wept with joy and the Prophet looked at them and he was overjoyed to see their joy and he said are are you amazed at this woman's Rama her compassion for her son I swear to you by him in whose hand lies my soul God shall show more Rama to his believing servant on the day of judgement and this woman shows to her son so again we find a kind of feminine possibility here and again we find that Rama is not legitimately translated or sufficiently translated just as compassion it has this sense of personal love as well and you won't read the Quran fully or correctly unless you recognize that this miss translation needs to be corrected there are other points that could be made in response to that particular point such as there is a divine name l word which is correctly translated as the loving or the loving kind it's one of God's 99 names that I'll be talking about a bit more next week so to say that Islam is not a religion of love or Islam does not have the idea of a loving God simply is not the case God created existence precisely as an expression of his unconditional love so to return very briefly before I close to this question of gender inclusive language as I said these new inclusive language lectionaries try to filter up this difficult word father whether they can actually do so or not is is a serious problem and Aslam as I said avoids this problem by not calling God father at all can this actually be done in Christianity without in telling actual doctrinal mutilation is it possible to censor out this term father which Jesus himself appears to have used well in Britain recently we had a British Council of Churches doctrinal Commission on Trinitarian doctrine today and this paper acknowledged the force of the feminist polemic and I'll just quote to you it's response the word father is to be construed apathetically that is by means of the determined thinking away of the inappropriate and in this context that means masculine connotations of the term what will remain will be an orientation to personhood to being in relation involving origination in a personal sense not maleness that's what they say and I have to say that I find this unsatisfactory and so do many of the feminist theologians if you have you cannot have a concept of fatherhood that is stripped of all of its male connotations because then you're not left with fatherhood it's not even Parenthood since Parenthood itself can only have two two modalities I think that the Commission is they were simply engaging in an exegetical slate of hand and this again may be something that's required by the whole structure of this belief system which has great British Unitarian John Biddle put it this theory is fitter for conjurer's and for Christians I think that this kind of talk is days are numbered if Christianity is to remain morally and intellectually coherent how it actually falls out is obviously not ultimately for me as an outsider to say but will be resolved through internal Christian reflection essentially that's all I wanted to say about this obviously complex discussion that has unfolded between these two great religions continues to unfold and will continue to unfold and perhaps it's appropriate to conclude by summarizing my own personal view on this I myself think that it is time for the religions to grow up and to transcend the old disreputable record that they have all acquired of sniping of polemic of mutual demonization the great Catholic theologian hands corn has pointed out that there can be no world peace without peace between the religions and I think there will only be peace between the religions when we recognize that we are no longer each other's enemies Christianity is not a major threat to Islam Islam is not a major collective threat to Christianity and so forth the real threat that equally threatens all of the world's religions is the common spirit of negation selfishness materialism that is what is really endangering religious faith in today's world and once this realization has been made and we have the maturity to acknowledge that we are no longer each other's enemies when we recognize that we have our backs up against the same wall then we will be able to use what we have in common which is quite considerable as a basis for creating a common front against the spirit of greed and negation which is causing so much suffering in today's world and it's my hope and my prayer that all of us here will have the the generosity of spirit and the vision to make this very important project a reality yes in the crime so you say you use the Romani heat but I mean it's just a way of saying but right now see he has a long term this transition use can be in our young the male personal pronoun is used for God for Allah but the theologians and the commentators all unanimously say that's not because God is male but because Arabic has no neuter and it's conventional in Arabic to use the male gender for what is neuter unless it's something that's something new to and plural in which case use the female but I can point to you hundreds of texts and no doubt Quranic experts like dr. Meara can do the same in which the theologians get out of the way to say no God is not male a lot is not male this our me well this is this is part of the specific nature of the Quranic discourse that got off from changes his manner of speech sometimes he calls himself I sometimes we or are sometimes he the Quran comes at its issues from different perspectives sometimes one of the confusing things people who come to the Quran for the first time they expect to see God always as he with the capital H sometimes God speaks in the first person depending on the kind of point that's being being addressed yes for the end that one of the Arabic terms of God whoo sorry yeah when you said that I kind of flashed on the garbage in a chapter 11 or you talked about the usefulness of a cup is in the empty space and the spokes of the wheel are really not as useful as the space is important and how perhaps is the energy between things that is in Godspell for the garbage or the creative force and maybe that is the less gender bound envisioning of a God force of air time yep that would be a legitimate way of saying it as long but Islam generally has tried although it maintains the idea of the transcendence of God nonetheless it tries to retain a personal God it's not Buddhism or Taoism you pray to God as if you were praying to a person even though that person is unimaginably different so Islam hasn't gone as far perhaps as Far Eastern religions of Garnon turning God into an impersonal force but just womb is the term that the Prophet himself used this is not just a theological or mystical speculation the Prophet himself in a sound hadith said that God's name ar-rahman the all-compassionate all the all loving is derived otama logically from the concept of womb exclude a mutual profession of that fourth that's true Islamic worship has two registers it has the the formal salat the five daily prayers which is like an affirmation of something that's very awesome and very different distant this some 10z the divine transcendence and other nests but it also has the personal aspect of prayer the door art when Muslims raise their hands like that Christians do it like that Muslims do it like that which is when you're addressing a personal God which is petition or prayer which is the address to the eminent God Islam tries to recognize both of those registers so the Quran says LASIK me3 he shape nothing is like God and it also affirms the divine imminence by saying and God is closer to man than his jugular vein it does these two things and it's really for the Mystics to show how those two things are compatible one would not be uncommon comparison perhaps is a different physical location for God being closed young something else that you can support again that Islam sees God as transcendence non-gender there's nothing Christian doctrine that says god is genuine but rather than Jesus formulation of relationship with God was unto Allah or daddy and that does no doubt caused problems for families I not ever know okay but by the same token Christian doctrine does not explicitly say God is named in however the language in the force of the limitations of language basic gets into trouble it's an important point certainly Muslims themselves would say Jesus cannot have conceived of God as male because he had the same doctrine as did all of the other prophets and this must be a misunderstanding or an indication of a term that was meant to some kind of metaphor nonetheless I think one has to take the feminist objections seriously and that historically in justices have been worked on the basis of what you take to be a misunderstanding of what Jesus intended and I'm not here to pass judgment on Christian doctrine or to say what is right Christianity what is wrong Christianity I'm merely pointing out certain trends that seem to me as an outsider to be moving forward and suggesting what the implications where that might be for dialogue but I'm not suggesting what the critic the correct Christian position should be middle school teachers my kids will want to know about the Blackstone right the Ferengi system of the Blackstone the content I've got various different depending on which sorcery my gosh Abraham what's the real deal you said they don't worship it but basically it's not worship its effective function is to serve as a marker but to show people where they start the Torah otherwise and symbolically it's got right hand on earth and one of the things the pilgrim can do optionally is to kiss it which is an emblem of kissing the hand of God are you really the Abrahamic covenant which is the function of the pilgrimage function the pilgrimage is to show that you're part of the Abrahamic covenant and dimension of the religion sir the pilgrims ideally can kiss the stone although generally people nowadays don't because if you've got two million people in front of you also want to kiss the black stone you have to be a kind of all-in wrestle it before you get within 20 feet of it so symbolically it is a physical manifestation of something that allows to her it's a simple yes but it's not regarded as something that's intrinsically holy or relic or anything like that it's it's not worshipped or regarded in that way the question um I mean any religion in its beginning is sort of controllable just for me the amount of worshipers are and is on nouns is our just huge I mean have there been any discussions or comes with as far as like the heart you mean it's so cumbersome now than it would have been we have five hundred years ago the Hajj yamaraja's overcrowded until 50 years ago only about a hundred thousand two hundred thousand people did it nonetheless I've done it three times and it's not intolerably overcrowded you just have to know exactly the times to go you get three in the morning rather than four in the afternoon when everybody else is going or you do the Tawaf on the roof rather than trying to get close to the Kaaba and the Saudis do try to restrict numbers they impose quotas under countries like every year only a hundred thousand people are given visas in Nigeria for instance and it's a symbol a similar number for Bangladesh etc and sometimes those countries also impose quotas because it's bad for their balance of payments to have lots of people taking money out of the country and spending it in in Mecca so there are attempts now to put a lid on it but theoretically the Hajj could accommodate a lot more was that what you wanted to know yeah Christian perspective immediately that a lot of the theology or the practice the large again the more in some ways away from the kernel the tooth the symbol tooth so that's happening you know through the years one of the interesting things about the basic practices of Islam is that although they were framed within the context of small Arabian communities in the seventh century they are all perfectly practicable today and the hadras an example of that and that is easier to do the Hajj now than it was a hundred years ago because you have dozens of little health clinics there you have an airport you have air conditioning in tents and it's you can do it in in style you can live in a a villa in must deliver instead of a tent if you want to do that so it's I think it's become easier for a lot of people and more difficult and Muslims would hold this up as one of the proofs of the eternal validity of the religion that despite its specific 7th century Arabian origins it still works today and that you can practice it in a Baku New Mexico really just as easily as you could in 7th century Medina despite its sometimes the complexity of its rulings I think perhaps that's enough and I'm feeling a bit hollow and about two people

Channel: Islam On Demand

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Keywords: Abdal, Hakim, Murad, Islam, Jesus, Christ, Christianity, Bible, Gospels, Church, Baptism, Holy, Spirit, Trinity, Son, God, Allah, Divinity, Virgin, Birth, Mother, Saint, Disciples, Apostles, Vatican, Pope, Monotheism, Muhammad, Comforter, Religion, Truth, Moses, Abraham, Noah, Catholic, Catholicism, Hail, Mary, Immaculate, Conception, Nicea, Nicean, Salvation, Savior, Lord, Pray, Idol, Vicarious, Atonement, Died, Sins, Evangelical, Communion, Baptist, Unitarian, Blood, Crucify, Crucifixion, Cross, Isa, Issa, Crusades, Crusader, Inquisition, Dark, Ages, Europe

Id: RZ_lXtzrEp0

Length: 75min 0sec (4500 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2011