By Francis X. Maier
During three of my 27 years on the diocesan staff, I had the collateral duty of ecumenical and interreligious affairs. It was a great job. We had good relations with the local Protestant and Latter-day Saint communities; cordial conversations with local rabbis; and personal friendships with local leaders of Greek Orthodoxy and the American Jewish Committee.
With Islam, the story was different. Over the years, we had a total of two contacts: a letter from a local imam insisting that we convert, and a visit from a young imam, formerly Catholic, eager to explain how everything good in Christianity really derived from Islam, the (supposedly) original divine revelation. Unfortunately for him, he chose an unreceptive audience.
I mention this for a reason. During those same years, I recall at least one evening sitting through a parish presentation on the “three Abrahamic religions.” In it, the parish DRE repeatedly compared, with the best of intentions, “the Bible” and “the holy Qur’an.” I then had the delicate task of explaining that, in Christian belief, the Bible is holy and inspired by God. The Qur’an—whatever its beautiful elements—is not.
Christians do not recognize Muhammad as a true prophet. Nor is Islam the product of divine revelation, let alone the original one. And the three “Abrahamic” religions—as Rémi Brague, Jacques Ellul, and many others have pointed out—have far deeper differences than similarities.
In short, interreligious dialogue, including dialogue with Islam, is an admirable goal. But confused irenicism serves neither truth nor healthy mutual understanding.
Brague, the distinguished French Catholic philosopher and Arabist, describes the limits of Christian-Muslim dialogue:
For Islam, the survival of the Christian religion is an anachronism. Islam presents itself . . . as the true Christianity, since, according to Islamic thought, Christians have disfigured the authentic Gospel, just as the Jews, for their part, have betrayed the authentic Torah. Thus, an appeal to a common Scripture is out of the question. This means, from the Muslim point of view, that “Islamic-Christian dialogue” is a dialogue between true Christians (namely, the Muslims themselves) and people who imagine themselves to be true Christians, but are not. That is why dialogue interests Christians more than Muslims.
In practice, Islamic ignorance of the actual content of Christianity, and its chronic lack of interest in it, can be astonishing. Bernard Lewis, the great Jewish scholar of Muslim civilization, noted that over the centuries and into the modern era, most Muslims have believed that the Trinity, whose worship Islam condemns as an almost polytheistic blasphemy, [consists] of God, Jesus, and Mary.”
Most Christians know that they do not know Islam. But the reverse is not true. Most Muslims tend to assume that they already know everything they need to know about Christianity, since the Qur’an speaks of Christians. The result is a chasm made impassable by Islam’s claim to be the original, and only pure, divine revelation that supersedes all others.
None of this need prevent honest attempts at mutual respect and understanding. But it should prevent Christian naïveté. Catholics recite the Nicene Creed at every Sunday Mass. It is the constitutional expression of what we believe. Over 17 centuries, men and women have died defending it. With the exception of the Creed’s first line, Islam rejects every key element of the text.
Historically, in Muslim-dominated cultures—as Rémi Brague notes, and we too often forget—“Jews and Christians were subjected to various measures explicitly designed to make them understand, by humiliating them, that it would be fitting for them to adopt Islam.” Similar forms of Muslim behavior continue today. Christians face prejudice, persecution, kidnappings, and forced conversions in various Muslim states.
This week we commemorate the 25th anniversary of 9/11. To blame an entire religious community for the actions of an extremist minority would be a mistake. Nevertheless, on the occasion of our nation’s 250th birthday, we might recall an observation by Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America: “I studied the [Qur’an] a great deal. . . .I came out of that study with the conviction that, taken as a whole, there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. . . .[A]lthough less absurd than ancient polytheism, its social and political tendencies are, in my opinion, infinitely more to be feared.”
Tocqueville’s words, written in a private letter to his friend Arthur de Gobineau at the time of the French colonization of Algeria, are brutally harsh; but no harsher than earlier criticisms of Islam by St. John Damascene and St. Thomas Aquinas, among others.
Perhaps it is better to close with some remarks by St. John Paul II. Karol Wojtyła held more substantive meetings with Muslim leaders than all previous popes combined. And he approached Islam with sincere goodwill, without diminishing its differences from Christianity:
Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the [Qur’an], clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In Islam, all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has been definitively set aside.
Some of the most beautiful names in human language are given to the god of the [Qur’an], but he is ultimately a god outside the world, a god who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us. Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no place for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad. Mary, His Virgin Mother, is also mentioned, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason, not only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity.
Sadly (in this case), beliefs have consequences. And for Christians, the cost of misunderstanding Islam is bitterly high.
About the author
Francis X. Maier is a senior fellow in Catholic studies at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He is the author of True Confessions: Voices of Faith from a Life in the Church.