Jesus through Muslim eyes –
Prof Tarif Khalidi University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK Sheikh Zayed Chair in Islamic and Arabic Studies at American University of Beirut. (internationally renowned Islamic Studies scholar) (presented in a BBC Telecast)
In the year 630 A.D, the Prophet Muhammad achieved one of his most cherished goals: the occupation of Mecca and the subsequent cleansing of the city from idol worship: it was at once a political and a religious victory of immense symbolic importance. Mecca had been declared the center of the new faith; its conquest was therefore the fulfillment of a divine promise.
Entering the Ka’ba, the square structure which housed the city’s idols, Muhammad ordered all its icons cleansed or destroyed. One of the icons in what must have been a very mixed gallery of divinities was a Virgin and child. Approaching the Christian icon, Muhammad covered it with his cloak and ordered all the others washed away except that one.
Fact or fiction? The question is immaterial. The report I cited is at least 1200 years old and therefore belongs to some of the earliest strata of Muslim historical writing.
What this episode illustrates is the fact that between Islam and the figure of Jesus Christ there exists a literary tradition spanning a millennium and a half of a continuous historical relationship — a preoccupation with Jesus that may well be unique among the world’s great non-Christian religions. To do full justice to this record, I would need a far larger canvas than the one available to me today. Instead I can only hope to draw a sketch of the contours of that relationship; to point to only a few of its highest peaks, its defining moments.
The Qur’an is the axial text of Islamic civilization, and it is of course where we must begin for Islam’s earliest images of Jesus. Approximately one third of the Quranic text is made up of narratives of earlier prophets, most of them Biblical. Among these prophetic figures, Jesus stands out as the most puzzling. The Qur’an rewrites the story of Jesus more radically than that of any other prophet, and in doing so it reinvents him. The intention is clearly to distance him from the opinions about him current among Christians. The result is surprising to a Christian reader or listener. The Jesus of the Qur’an, more than any equivalent prophetic figure , is placed inside a theological argument rather than inside a narrative. He is very unlike his Gospel image. There is no Incarnation, no Ministry and no Passion. His divinity is strenuously denied either by him or by God directly. Equally denied is his crucifixion. A Christian may well ask, what can possibly be left of his significance if all these essential attributes of his image are gone?
Jesus reinterpreted by the Qur’an is singled out, again and again, as a prophet of very special significance. Uniquely among prophets he is described as a miracle of God, an aya ; he is the word and spirit of God; he is the prophet of peace par excellence; and , finally it is he who predicts the coming of Muhammad and thus, one might say, is the harbinger of Islam.
How did these earliest images of Jesus grow and develop inside Islamic culture ? The Hadith or Prophetic Tradition of Muhammad, depicts him as a figure who will come at the end of days to help bring the world to its end. He can now be said to bracket the era of Islam, standing right at its beginning and right at its end. But it is the rapidly growing literary tradition of Islam which now began to embrace the various images of Jesus current in the lands that Islam had conquered. There came together a corpus of sayings and stories attributed to Jesus which in their totality one could call the Muslim Gospel (a collection of these I have just published under the title The Muslim Jesus). Let me quote a few of these sayings and stories: “Jesus said, Blessed is he who sees with his heart but whose heart is not in what he sees”. Here’s another: ” Jesus said, The world is a bridge; cross this bridge but do not build upon it” And here’s a short exchange: ” Jesus met a man and asked him, What are you doing? “I am devoting myself to God,” the man replied. Jesus asked,” Who is caring for you?” “My brother,” said the man. Jesus said, “Your brother is more devoted to God than you are”. And so it goes on, some three hundred such sayings and stories, which Muslim culture was to ascribe to Jesus across a millennium of continuous fascination with his images and manifestations. At times he is a fierce ascetic, at other times he is the gentle teacher of manners, at yet others the patron of Muslim mystics, the prophet of the secrets of creation, the healer of the wounds of nature and of man.
But back now to my sketch, to just a few other illuminations inside this lengthy historical record. In the tenth century A.D. we have the great Baghdad mystic al-Hallaj, whose life and crucifixion was called “The Passion of al-Hallaj” by the celebrated French Orientalist Massignon. If you want to take my word for it, you would regard him as one of the most Christ-like figures in human history, up there with Socrates, Gandhi and one or two of the greatest saints of mankind. What made al Hallaj a Christ-like figure was total absorption in the life of the spirit, a realm lying beyond law, and an exploration of a reality that led him ultimately to claim identity with the divine. But at the same time, there is in him the unshakable willingness to submit to the law, even unto death. So he dies under the law, as it were, in order to rise above it, in order to triumph over the law. Thus, at one time he used to advise his disciples: “Why go on pilgrimage to Mecca? Build a small shrine inside your own house and circumambulate it in true faith, and it is as if you have performed the pilgrimage.” The tension between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law endows the life of Hallaj with a Gospel-like aura, culminating in his trial, his tragic last days and his heart-rending crucifixion. The model of sanctity prefigured by al-Hallaj was to survive most notably inside Muslim mysticism where Jesus was to become a patron saint of Muslim sufism.
But let me move now to later times. The era of the Crusades, a two-hundred year war, pitted European Christian against Western Asian Muslim armies. And here was a chance for Muslim scholars to point to the glaring disparity between Jesus, the prophet of peace, and the barbaric conduct of his so-called followers. In the twelfth century, Jesus was once again reclaimed by Muslim polemics, once again reinvented, if you prefer, in order to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Muslims against his alleged followers. In the battle for the legacy of Jesus, there was no doubt whatsoever in Muslim eyes that the true Jesus belonged to Islam. It was in a sense a replay of the Qur’anic scenario, this time more urgent and dangerous.
As we approach our own days, we observe that many of his earlier manifestations continue to dominate the spiritual horizons of contemporary Islam. Let me speak of only two major images: Jesus the healer of nature and man, and Jesus the Crucified. To encounter Jesus the healer, I invite my listeners to take a trip to to the Monastery of Sidnaya north of Damascus or to the Iranian city of Shiraz . The Monastery of Sidnaya was founded by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the 6th century AD. It sits on an outcrop of rock high above a valley. To this Monastery travels an endless stream of men and women seeking the blessings and healing of our Lady and her infant son. The vast majority of visitors are Muslim, who come to this Christian shrine as did their ancestors for a thousand years.
A visit to Shiraz might come next. Here, the celebrated city, a treasure house of Muslim art and architecture and a garden-city of poets and mystics, is home also to a living Muslim medical tradition of healing, the tradition of the Masiha-Dam, the healing breath of Christ. This theme is already reflected in the poetry of the great Persian poet Hafiz, some seven hundred years ago. Thus, in both the literary as well as medical tradition of contemporary Iran, there runs a continuous preoccupation with the healing Christ figure. For Shii Islam, which dominates Iran, the martyrdom of Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, in 682 A.D. is a central spiritual event. And for Shii Islam in particular, the life and death of Christ is a parallel spiritual event. The Christ/Husayn analogy is ever present in the religious sensibility of Shi’i Islam.
I should now make mention of another poet, widely considered the greatest Arab poet of the twentieth century: the Iraqi Badr Shakir al-Sayyab. His life was one of exile, imprisonment, ill health and of total commitment to the cause of the oppressed; his was a poetry utterly Modernist in form but utterly classical in diction. In his verse one will find what is probably the most memorable impact of Christ on modern Arabic/Islamic literature. One poem in particular, entitled “Christ after the Crucifixion” is a Passion, a vision of Christ as lord of nature and redeemer of the wretched of the earth. At the risk of doing violence to its tight structure, I will read only its first and its final stanzas:
After they brought me down, I heard the winds In a lengthy wail, rustling the palm trees, And steps fading away. So then, my wounds, And the Cross upon which they nailed me all afternoon and evening Did not kill me. I listened. The wail Was crossing the plain between me and the city Like a rope pulling at a ship As it sinks to the sea-bed. The dirge Was like a thread of light between dawn and midnight, Upon a grieving winter sky. And the city, nursing its feelings, fell asleep
I was in the beginning, and in the beginning was Poverty. I died that bread may be eaten in my name; that they plant me in season. How many lives will I live! For in every furrow of earth I have become a future, I have become a seed. I have become a race of men, in every human heart A drop of my blood, or a little drop
After they nailed me and I cast my eyes towards the city I hardly recognised the plain, the wall, the cemetry; As far as the eye could see, it was something Like a forest in bloom. Wherever the vision could reach, there was a cross, a grieving mother The Lord be sanctified ! This is the city about to give birth.
This is a poem of salvation, political and theological, a poem that interweaves, in a apocalyptic voice, the Jesus of the Gospels and the risen Christ triumphant, a Jesus who is lord of the wretched of the earth and a Christ who is lord and healer of nature. It is a poetic gospel in miniature, a vision of Christ in suffering and ultimately in victory.
So: I think it can safely be shown that Islamic culture presents us with what in quantity and quality are the richest images of Jesus in any non-Christian culture. No other world religion known to me has devoted so much loving attention to both the Jesus of history and to the Christ of eternity. This tradition is one that we need to highlight in these dangerous, narrow-minded days. The moral of the story seems quite clear: that one religion will often act as the hinterland of another, will lean upon another to complement its own witness. There can be no more salient example of this interdependence than the case of Islam and Jesus Christ. And for the Christian in particular, a love of Jesus may also mean, I think, an interest in how and why he was loved and cherished by another religion
Moin,
Wow! Many thanks. Salam, Bob
—————–
Forwarded Message:
Subj:
Re: Please send Archbishop of Canterbury’s Al Azhar talk to Sheilamusaji@aol….
Date:
10/29/2004 11:15:10 AM Eastern Standard Time
From:
To:
CC:
Right-click picture(s) to display picture options
Brother Crane.
I am quickly attaching the Archbishop’s message here along with some other research that I have accumulated on the subject
The Pope has already reaffrimed the cocept of MULTIPLE COVENANTS between God and Jews, Christians and Muslims
The Archbishop also seems to bring us closer
The Unitarian, Quaker, and Mormon concepts of Unity of God are closer to Islam. The Presbyterians and the Episcopalians certainly think of the Bible as “infallible” and not “inerrant” or TOTALLY divine
In a message dated 10/28/2004 9:08:40 PM Eastern Daylight Time, Transcendentlaw writes:
I would appreciate it if you could resend your email to me so that when I return to Florida next week I can store it electronically. I want to send it to Rev. William Baker, who wants to co-author a book with me, entitled Muslims and Christians: Our Jihad Against Terrorism. This is to be in lieu of publishing the book that I completed 18 months ago but have been holding for revision at the right time. Since the ultimate is beauty, the Archbishop’s beautiful teachngs, like Jesus himself, is the way to God. Perhaps we can at least refer to it in our book.
ADDRESS OF THE ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY AT AL-AZHAR
11 September 2004
I am very deeply moved by the honor of being invited to address you in this place, as a guest and, I hope, as a friend. It is some twenty five years since I first visited this great city and al-Azhar mosque; and I can remember my wonder and delight at the quality of its buildings and the atmosphere of dedication and calm reflection expressed in the very stones of the walls.
I am here as a Christian, to speak to you of some of those matters which both unite us and divide us. In the world as it is now developing, it is of the most central importance that we as Christians and Muslims understand one another better. I am delighted at the continuing commitment to this process that has been shown here, a commitment evident in these last few days. And better understanding means understanding our differences as well as our common vision. In these few remarks, I want to meditate a little on the greatest theme of both Muslim and Christian faith, the doctrine of God; and I want to suggest how, despite some of our differences, we can, in the light of our belief about Almighty God, together make certain affirmations to the world about the way to peace and justice for human beings.
If I understand the doctrine of Islam correctly, its most important conviction can be expressed in the word tawhid. God is one. No being is associated with God as a second reality deserving of worship and obedience. God has no need of any being outside his own eternal and self-sufficient life. In these words, I do no more than repeat some of the most luminous and uncompromising words of the Qur’an, which I give in the new translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem.
‘God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful.’ (al-Baqara 255)
‘He is God the One,
God the eternal.
He fathered no one nor was he fathered.
No one is comparable to Him.’ (al ‘Ikhlaas 1-4)
This last text reminds the Christian that this great affirmation of the uniqueness of God is what has always caused Muslims to look with suspicion at Christian doctrines of God. Christian belief about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appears at once to compromise the belief that God has no other being associated with him. How can we call God al-Qayyuum, the Self-sufficient, if he is not alone? So we hear in al-Baqara 115-117,
‘The East and the West belong to God:
wherever you turn, there is His Face.
God is all pervading and all knowing.
They have asserted, “God has a child.”
May He be exalted! No!
Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him,
everything devoutly obeys His will.
He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth,
and when He decrees something, He says only “Be,” and it is.’
The belief that God could have a son is, for the faithful Muslim, a belief suggesting that God needs something other than himself and is subject to the processes of limited bodies by ‘begetting’ a child. How can such a God be truly free and sovereign? For we know that he is able to bring the world into being by his word alone.
Yet these anxieties do not belong only to Muslims. Egypt was, in the first centuries of the Christian era, the location of great debates on just such matters. Indeed, without the contribution of Egypt, Christian theology would have been infinitely poorer, for many of the greatest minds of that period were natives of Alexandria. And one of the great concerns of these thinkers and their successors was this: if Christians say that the eternal Word and power of God was fully present in Jesus, son of Mary, can we avoid saying this in such a way as to imply that God is subject to a physical process, or that God has a second being alongside him? These Christian sages believed as strongly as any Muslim that God was self-sufficient and free, and that he could not be affected or limited by physical processes and did not act as a physical cause among others. They say quite explicitly that when we speak of the father ‘begetting’ the Son, we must put out of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a process like the processes of the world.
Those Christian thinkers and their successors developed a doctrine which tried to clarify this: they said that the name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person, a limited being with a father and mother and a place that they inhabit within the world. ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life – eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. And that life is lived eternally in three ways which are made known to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people and in the life of Jesus. There is a source of life, an expression of life and a sharing of life. In human language we say, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, but we do not mean one God with two beings alongside him, or three gods of limited power. Just as we say, ‘Here is my hand, and these are the actions my one hand performs’, but it is not different from the actions of my five fingers, so with God: this is God, the One, the Living and Self-subsistent, but what God does is not different from the life which is eternally at the same time a source and an expression and a sharing of life. Since God’s life is always an intelligent and purposeful life, each of these dimensions of divine life can be thought of as a centre of mind and love; but this does not mean that God ‘contains’ three different individuals, separate from each other as human individuals are.
And Christians believe that this life enters into ours in a limited degree. When God takes away our evildoing and our guilt, when he forgives us and sets us free, he breathes new life into us, as he breathed life into Adam at the first. That breathing into us we call the ‘Spirit’. As we become mature in our new life, we become more and more like the expression of divine life, the Word whom we encounter in Jesus. Because Jesus prayed to the source of his life as ‘Father’, we call the eternal expression of God’s life the ‘Son’. And so too we pray to the source of divine life in the way that Jesus taught us, and we say ‘Father’ to this divine reality.
But in no way does the true Christian say that the life and action of God could be divided into separate parts, as if it were a material thing. In no way does the true Christian say that there is more than one God or that God needs some other in order to act or that God promotes some other being to share his glory. There is one divine action, one divine will; yet (like the fingers of the hand) there are three ways in which that life is real, and it is only in those three ways that the divine life is real – as source and expression and sharing. It is because of those three ways in which divine life exists that Christians speak as they do about what it means to grow in holiness.
And the Christian also says something which may again be a source of disagreement. God is a loving God, as we all agree; but, says the Christian, God does not love simply because he decides to love. He is always, eternally, loving. His very nature, his definition is love. And the interaction and relation between the three ways in which God lives, the source and the expression and the sharing, is eternally the way God exists. The three centres of divine action, which we call Father, Son and Spirit, pour out the divine life to each other for all eternity, a sort of perfect circle of giving and receiving. And the only word we can use for that relationship of pouring out and giving is love. So as we grow in holiness, we become closer and closer in our actions and thoughts to the complete self-giving that always exists perfectly in God’s life. Towards this fullness we are all called to travel and grow.
Now these are difficult matters, and the greatest minds of the Christian Church have always found them hard to put into words. But what I wish to say to you today is simply that the disagreement between Christian and Muslim is not, I believe, a disagreement about the nature of God as One and Living and Self-subsistent. For us as for you, it is essential to think of God as a life that has no limit, as a life that is free. God is never to be listed alongside other beings. All through the centuries that we call the Middle Ages, Christians, Muslims and Jews thought alike about this, and our greatest philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Maimonides and others, all worked to make this clear. They would all have agreed that only if God is alone and needs no other is he worthy of our complete worship and devotion. God is not a being who is like us, only greater and more powerful. If God were like us only much greater, we might worship him out of fear instead of giving him free obedience and love. But the true God’s freedom is infinite and he can never be limited by any definition. When we have used up all the names that human language can find for him, we shall have spoken true things of him, but never expressed the whole truth which is hidden from created minds. And so we adore him in trust and thankfulness but we accept that we shall never have him in our grasp.
Together we can acknowledge these things. And it is sad that sometimes an unfaithful or careless Christian way of speaking has led Muslims and Jews to believe that we have a doctrine of God that does not recognise the oneness and sufficiency of God, or that we worship something less than the One, the Eternal. In our conversations with Muslim friends, we Christians are rightly challenged to think more deeply, to think as our Egyptian Christian fathers did, about the unity of Almighty God.
But there is a practical consequence of this belief about the One Living God. If God is truly not a part of the world, truly self-sufficient, then his will never depends upon how things turn out in the world. We cannot work out what is just and good simply from what seems to work, from what the world finds successful or easy or popular. What is good and just is rooted in eternal truth, in the nature of God, who is what he is quite independently of what the world is and what the world thinks. The world may tell us that we should behave in such and such a way – that we should seek only to make and keep money, that we should break our promises, that we should take revenge and show no mercy, that we should take our pleasures where we like. Sometimes behaviour of this sort seems to bring success in the world. But the believer knows that no amount of worldly success can make bad things good, because nothing in the world can change the will of God, who is beyond all change and cannot be affected or weakened by any other being. So we hold to our calling to virtue and generosity and justice whatever may happen, even if, today and tomorrow, it does not make our life easy and comfortable. We struggle in our interior, spiritual battle, to be faithful to God’s will.
The greatest challenge today for our world is how to react to circumstances in a way that is faithful to God’s will. Undoubtedly, greed and revenge affect all of us. We feel that we want to defend ourselves in the way that a person without faith or hope or love would understand – in anger and bitterness and unforgiving cruelty. But when we act in such a way, we show that we do not really believe in a God who is living and self-sufficient. We do not believe that God’s will is enough; we act as though the circumstances of this world could so change things that cruelty and fear could become the right tools with which to defend ourselves.
So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his neighbour of another faith following the ways of this world instead of the peaceful will of God, he must remind his neighbour of the nature of the one God we look to, whose will cannot be changed and who will himself see that justice is done. Once we let go of justice, fairness and respect in our dealings with one another, we have dishonoured God as well as human beings. I am deeply grateful that it was once again in this country that Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from the Holy Land under the co-chairmanship of the Grand Imam, Dr Tantawy, signed the Alexandria Declaration together, with its commitment to respect for the rights of the peoples of the Holy Land, its call for justice, and its refusal of terror and violence. How much we still need that vision to inspire us today, as the tragedies of this region of the world continue to resist settlement!
There is no doubt that the present violence throws a deep shadow over conversations between the West and the Muslim world. Three years ago today, I was one of those who shared just a little in the terrible experience of the events in New York. I was in a building just a short distance from the World Trade Centre that morning, and for a while I and my colleagues were trapped there; we were among those fortunate enough to be able to get out of the area just as the second tower collapsed, and we saw at first hand something of the nightmare and the suffering of that day.
On the day after, I was asked by a journalist for some of my reactions. I said that when someone spoke to us in the language of hatred or abuse, we had a choice about what language we might use to reply. So when someone ‘spoke’ to us in violence and murder, we could choose what we should do. We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another – our people, our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our belief in the living God who always requires of us justice and goodness.
So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in violent revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the innocent, that person bears witness to the true God. They have stepped outside the way the faithless world thinks. A person without faith, hope and love may say, If I do not use indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no safety for me. The believer says, My safety is with God, whose justice can never be defeated. If I defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way that honours God and God’s image in others, and that does not offend against God’s justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards the One Living and Almighty God.
This is why it is important to be clear about the God we worship. There is, as you will have seen, a great difference between what I as a Christian must say and what the Muslim will say; but we agree absolutely that God has no need of any other being, and that God is not a mixture or a society of different beings. And if we are committed to this God, we shall be able to do justice and act rightly even when the world around us expects us to follow its own violent ways.
And just as I have said that Christians have sometimes spoken carelessly about God and led others to think they believe less than they truly do, so all of us, Jews, Muslims and Christians, have sometimes spoken carelessly and let people think that we live by the same standards as those who have no faith or love, appearing to encourage violence and terror. If we look back to the Alexandria Declaration, we see how it is possible for all of us, in the light of our conviction about God, to be committed to something different from the world’s ways; there we find a promise to approach each other with respect and patience and to turn away from open battle, even when we feel threatened by each other. There too we find the common commitment not to use the name of God to justify violence and injustice. It has been impressive to hear in recent days the strength and clarity with which so many Muslim nations and Muslim leaders have condemned the unspeakable atrocities in Beslan. The common commitment of Muslims and Christians, as of all people of compassion, hope and intelligence, is not for a moment in doubt in this context.
In our own country, we have recently conducted a process in which Muslims and Christians together have listened to the concerns and hopes of many local communities, and we are now hoping to set up a national forum in which the anxieties of Muslim communities may be expressed and freely discussed. And we have also been discussing how each of the religious communities in Britain should react when any one of them is under threat or open attack – so that we hope a Christian community will give support to local Muslims if a mosque is attacked, and Muslims may do the same for local Jews if a synagogue is attacked or a cemetery desecrated, and Muslims and Jews will stand alongside Christians when they are abused and attacked. We pray that this willingness to stand alongside each other will be shared in other nations.
We believe that in such local ways we can, despite our disagreements, show to the world a different standard of behaviour, one that is worthy of the all-powerful and self-sufficient God we worship, worthy of him in a way that crusades and terrorism and oppression are not. All of us need to be able to repent before God for our errors and for the ways in which we are enslaved by a greedy and fearful world. But as our Christian scriptures say, we must not be conformed to this world but transformed, with our minds renewed (Romans 12.2).
If we truly understand the nature of our God, our minds will be renewed. We do not only teach truths about God, we allow those truths to change our lives. May we all find the strength and the courage from Almighty God to honour him by seeking peace together in fairness and respect and thanksgiving for each other.
‘To be one of those who believe
and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.’ (al-Balad 17).
And as Jesus says in our own Christian Scriptures,
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they will be shown mercy…
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they will be called children of God (Matthew 5.6-7, 9).
http://www.episcopalchurch.org/6947_50874_ENG_HTM.htm
Thanks for a good article. I must be on the right track, since I bought Crescent and the Cross about a year ago and used it extensively to update Dr. Crane’s book when he asked to revise it. I did so much work on it, that he called me a “co-author” of his latest version.
The attached article should be used in conjunction with my earlier article on Arianism and the Haneefs and what Fletcher actually calls Islam the Hetro Christianity..John from Damscus is called the first apologetic of Islam and a detractor………………..in his book the “Heresies of Ishamail” he pretty much defines Arianism. Sir Isaac Newton, Jefferson, Adam, Franklin and others used these Unitarian ideas and are today called “Deists”.
John of Damscus in today’s light would not be considered an apologetic of Islam. I would consider him a proponent of Islam since he ties Islam to a kind of Gnostic Gospel.
Obviously this is heresy in Islam since it reduces the prophet and Quran. However it is fascinating to see the link between Islam and Christianity as we have seen in the articles sent to us by Dr. Khan, Dr. Siddiqui and my own article. If we read all these in conjunction with what the Archbishop of Canterbury says, it paints a picture of immense interaction between Islam and a much closer relationship than generally accepted.
Please also note that Syriac and Coptic Christians were closer to “Unitarians” and the heterodox Christian doctrine of Nestorianism. From a Christian perspective These were all the “heresies” that eventually got purged by Emperor Constantine and got included into Islam
Nestorius
Nestorius (c.386-c.451) was a pupil of Theodore of Mopsuestia in Antioch and later became Patriarch of Constantinople. He preached against the use of the title Mother of God (Theotokos) for the Virgin Mary and would only call her Mother of Christ (Christotokos). He also argued that God could never be a helpless child, and could not suffer on the cross. His opponents accused him of dividing Christ into two persons: arguing that God the Word did not suffer on the cross, while Jesus the man did, or that God the Word was omniscient, while Jesus the man had limited knowledge, effectively implies two separate persons with separate experiences. Nestorius responded that he believed that Christ was indeed one person (Greek: prosopon).Nestorius was opposed by Cyril of Alexandria and finally condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431, which held that Christ is one person, and that the Virgin Mary is the mother of God. The pronouncement of the Council is available here (http://www.monachos.net/patristics/christology/cyril_to_nestorius_3.shtml). The condemnation resulted in the Nestorian schism and the separation of Assyrian Church of the East from the Byzantine Church. But even Ephesus could not settle the issue, and the Byzantine Church was soon split again by the Monophysite schism over the question whether Christ had one or two natures.Today it is generally accepted that the accusations against Nestorius and the Assyrian Church were exaggerated. The real question should have been whether properties of the Divine Word can be ascribed to the man Jesus Christ, and vice versa. This sharing of properties is called Communicatio idiomatum, and is part of Alexandrian, Byzantine, and Roman doctrine. For the position of the Assyrian Church look at this (http://www.nestorian.org/nestorian_theology.html) page.[edit]
Christological implications
The teaching of Nestorius has important consequences that deal with soteriology and the theology of the Eucharist. During the Protestant Reformation, when some groups denied the Real Presence, they were accused of reviving the error of Nestorius.[edit]
The involvement of the Assyrian Church
Cyril of Alexandria worked hard to remove Nestorius and his supporters and followers from power. But in the Syriac speaking world Theodore of Mopsuestia was held in very high esteem, and the condemnation of his pupil Nestorius was not received well. His followers were given refuge. The Persian kings, who were at constant war with Byzantium, saw the opportunity to assure the loyalty of their Christian subjects and supported the Nestorian schism:
They granted protection to Nestorians (462).
They executed the pro-Byzantine Catholicos Babowai who was then replaced by the Nestorian Bishop of Nisibis Bar Sauma (484).
They allowed the transfer of the school of Edessa to the Persian city Nisibis when the Byzantine emperor closed it for its Nestorian tendencies (489). At Nisibis the school became even more famous than at Edessa. The main theological authorities of the school have always been Theodore and his teacher Diodorus of Tarsus. Unfortunatelly, only few of their writings have survived. The writings of Nestorius himself were only added to the curriculum of the school of Edessa-Nisibis in 530, shortly before the Fifth Ecumenical Council in 553 condemned Theodore of Mopsuestia as Nestorius’s predecessors.At the end of the 6th century the school went through a theological crisis when its director Henana of Adiabene tried to replace Theodore by his own doctrine, which followed Origen. Babai the Great (551-628), who was also the inofficial head of the Church at that time and revived the Assyrian monastic movement, refuted him and in the process wrote the normative Christology of the Assyrian Church, based on Theodore of Mopsuestia.A small sampling of Babai’s work is available in English translation here (http://www.cired.org/faith/bawai.html). The Book of Union is his principle surviving work on Christology. In it he explains that Christ has two qnome (essences), which are unmingled and eternally united in one parsopa (personality). This, and not Nestorianism, is the teaching of the Assyrian Church.Book: Wilhelm Baum and Dietmar W. Winkler: The Church of the East. A concise History, London-New York 2003[edit]
Modern Nestorianism
In addition to the Assyrian Church of the East, some Protestant/Reformed organizations foster or tolerate doctrine that could be seen as Nestorian, specifically the doctrine that the Virgin Mary is merely the mother of “Christ’s humanity” and denying that she could be seen as the mother of the Son of God.
In a message dated 10/18/04 9:14:44 PM Eastern Daylight Time, wkhan@optonline.net writes:
al-Mansur, the King of Morocco, was making a proposal to his English ally,
> Queen Elizabeth I. The idea was a simple one: that England was to help the
> Moors colonize America.
Western Perceptions of Islam
The Middle Ages: From Theological Rivalry to the Creation of “the Other” Ibrahim Kalin
George Washington University 14/04/2003
From the moment it emerged as a universal religion, Islam became a major challenge for Christianity: it was a new dispensation from Heaven that claimed to have completed the cycle of Abrahamic revelations. The references to Jewish and Christian themes in the Qur’an and Prophetic traditions (hadith), sometimes concurring with and sometimes diverging from the Biblical accounts, contributed to the Christians’ sense of both consternation and insecurity on the one hand, and to the urgency of responding to the Islamic claims of authenticity and family relation to monotheism, on the other. The earliest polemics between Muslim scholars and Christian theologians that took place in the Islamic world attest to the zeal of the two communities to defend their faiths against one another. Baghdad and Damascus from the 8th through the 10th centuries were the two main centers of intellectual exchange and theological polemics between Muslims and Christians. Even though theological rivalry is an invariable of this period, many ideas were exchanged in the fields of philosophy, logic, and theology – taking the mode of interaction beyond theological bickering. In fact, Christian theologians posed a double challenge to their Muslim counterparts because they were a step ahead in cultivating a full-fledged theological vocabulary by using the lore of ancient Greek and Hellenistic culture. No one single figure can illustrate this situation better than St. John of Damascus (c. 675-749) known in Arabic as Yahya Al-Dimashqi and in Latin as Johannes Damascenus. A court official of the Umayyad caliphate in Syria like his father Ibn Mansur, St. John was a crucial figure not only for the formation of Orthodox theology and the fight against the iconoclast movement of the 8th century, but also for the history of Christian polemics against “Saracens” – a pejorative name used for Muslims in most of the anti-Islamic polemics whose origins go back in all likelihood to St. John himself. St. John’s polemics, together with his contemporary Bede (d. 735) and, a generation later, Theodore Abu-Qurrah (d. 820 or 830), against Islam – as an essentially ‘Christian heresy’ or, to use St. John’s own words, as the “heresy of the Ishmaelites” – set the tone for the perceptions of Islam and continued to be an operative factor until the end of the Renaissance. In fact, most of the theological depictions concerning Islam as a ‘deceptive superstition of the Ishmaelites’ and a ‘forerunner of the Antichrist’ go back to St. John, who had no intentions for an interfaith understanding vis-à-vis Muslims. What is curious about St. John’s impact on his coreligionists in Western Europe is that he had a direct knowledge of the language and ideas of Muslims, which was radically absent among his followers in the West. R. W. Southern has rightly called this the “historical problem of Christianity” vis-à-vis Islam in the middle ages, viz., lack of first-hand knowledge of Islamic beliefs and practices as a precaution or deliberate choice to dissuade and prevent Christians from contaminating themselves with a heretic offshoot of Christianity. The absence of direct contact and reliable sources of knowledge led to a long history of spurious scholarship against Islam and the Prophet Muhammad in Western Christianity, and as a result, Islam remained as an eerie foe in the European consciousness for a good part of the Middle Ages. The problem was further compounded by the Byzantine opposition to Islam and the decidedly inimical literature produced by Byzantine theologians between the 8th and the 10th centuries on mostly theological grounds. Even though the anti-Islamic Byzantine literature displays considerable first-hand knowledge of Islamic faith and practices, including specific criticisms of some verses of the Qur’an, the perception of Islam as a theological rival and heresy was the leitmotif of this type of literature and provided a solid historical and theological basis for the later critiques of Islam. If deliberate ignorance was the cherished strategy of the period, the out-and-out rejection of Islam as a theological challenge was no less significant. The Qur’anic assertion of Divine unity without the Trinity, countenance of Jesus Christ as God’s prophet divested of divinity, and sustaining a religious community without the clergy and a church-like authority were some of the challenges that did not go unnoticed in the Western Christendom. Unlike Eastern Christianity that had a presence in the midst of the Muslim world and better access to the Muslim faith, the image of Islam in the West was relegated to an unqualified heresy par excellence and regarded as no different than paganism or Manichaenism from which St. Augustine had his historical conversion to Christianity. In contrast to Spain in a later period where the three Abrahamic faiths had a remarkable period of intellectual and cultural exchange, the vacuum created by the spatial and intellectual confinement of Western Christianity was filled in by folk tales about Islam and Muslims, paving the way for the new store of images, ideas, stories and myths that were brought in by the stories and fantasies of Crusaders. Paradoxically, the Crusades did not bring any new or more reliable knowledge about Islam but reinforced its image as paganism and idolatry. There was, however, one very important consequence of the Crusades as far as the perceptions of Islam are concerned. The Crusaders, it is to be noted, were the first Western Christians to go into the Islamdom and witness Islamic culture with its cities, roads, bazaars, mosques, palaces, and, most importantly, its inhabitants. With the Crusader came not only the legend of Saladin (Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi), the conqueror of Jerusalem, but also the stories of Muslim life, its promiscuity, its wealth and luxury, and a number of goods such as silk and paper. Combined with popular imagery, these stories and imported goods – presenting a world picture immersed in the luscious joys and luxuries of worldly life – confirmed the wicked nature of the heresy of the Ishmaelites. Even though the subdued sense of admiration tacit in these stories did very little in ameliorating the image of Islam, it opened a new door of perception for Islam and Muslims as a culture and civilization. In this way, Islam, vilified on purely religious and theological grounds, became something of a neutral value – if not possessing any importance in itself. The significance of this shift in perception cannot be overemphasized. After the 14th century when Christianity began to loose its grip on the Western world, many lay people, who did not bother themselves with Christian criticisms of Islam or any other culture and religion for that matter, were more than happy to refer to Islamic culture as a world outside the theological and geographical confinements of Christianity. In a rather curious way, Islamic civilization, to the extent to which it was known in Western Europe, was pitted against Christianity to reject its exclusive claim to truth and universality. This explains, to a considerable extent, the double attitude of the Renaissance towards Islam; the Renaissance Europe hated Islam as a religion but admired its civilization. During the passionate and bloody campaign of the Crusades, a most important and unexpected development took place for the written literature on Islam in the Middle Ages, and this was the translation of the Qur’an for the first time into Latin under the auspices of Peter the Venerable (d.c. 1156). The translation was done by the English scholar Robert of Ketton who completed his rather free and incomplete rendition in July 1143. As expected, the motive for this translation was not to gain a better understanding of Islam by reading its sacred scripture but to know the enemy better. Regardless of the intention behind it, the translation of the Qur’an was a momentous event since it shaped the scope and direction of the study of Islam in the middle ages and provided the critics of Islamic religion with a text on which they can build much of their anti
cipated criticisms. Parallel with this was an event that proved to be even more persistent and alarming to Europe. The extant literature on the life of the Prophet of Islam in Latin is by far more extensive and elaborate as well as ornate in depicting a picture of Prophet Muhammad that was to last up to our own day. And although St. John of Damascus was the first to call the Prophet of Islam a ‘false prophet’ before the 12th century there are hardly any references to ‘Mahomet’ as the Prophet Muhammad was known to the Latins, and he does not appear to have any significance for the formation of Christian polemics against Muslims. With the induction of the Prophet into the picture, however, a new and eschatological dimension was added to the preordained case of Islam as a villain faith because the Prophet of Islam could now be identified as the anti-Christ heralding the end of the times. The picturing of the Prophet of Islam suffered from the same historical problem of medieval Europe to which we have referred, namely the lack of the study of Islam based on original sources, texts, first-hand accounts, or histories. The notorious fact that there was not a single scholar among the Latin critics of Islam until the end of the 13th century who knew Arabic resurfaced as a major catalyst for the spurious depictions of the Prophet of Islam. The first work ever to appear on the Prophet Muhammad in Latin was Embrico of Mainz’s (d. 1077) Vita Mahumeti, culled mostly from Byzantine sources and embellished with profligate details about the personal and social life of the Prophet. The picture that emerges out of such works largely corroborated the apocalyptic framework within which the Prophet of Islam and his discomforting success in spreading the new faith was seen as fulfilling the Biblical promise of the anti-Christ. The theological concerns of the time simply shun any appeal to reliable scholarship for the next one or two centuries to come and laid the ideological foundations of the image of the Prophet. Almost all of the Latin works that have survived on the life of the Prophet had one solid goal: to show the impossibility of such a man as Muhammad to be God’s messenger. This is exceedingly clear in the picture with which we are presented. The prophet’s ‘this-worldly’ qualities as compared to the ‘other-worldly’ nature of Jesus Christ were a constant theme. The Prophet was given to sex and political power, both of which he used, the Latins reasoned, to destroy Christianity. He was merciless towards his enemies, especially towards Jews and Christians, and took pleasure in having his opponents tortured and killed. The only reasonable explanation for the enormous success of Muhammad in religious and political fields was something as malicious as heresy, viz., that he was a magician and used magical powers to convince and convert people. The focus on the psychological states of the Prophet was so persuasive, so it seemed to the Latins, and so persistent that as late as in the 19th century William Muir (1819-1905), a British official in India and later the Principal of Edinburgh University, joined his ‘medireview’ predecessors by calling the Prophet a ‘psychopath’ in his extremely polemical Life of Mohammed. There are many other details that can be mentioned here such as the Christian background of the Prophet, his dead body being eaten and desecrated by pigs or that he was baptized secretly just before his death as a last attempt to save his soul. These details are truly interesting and reveal various facets of the spirit of the age in which the picture of the Prophet was drawn in an exceedingly hostile, polemical, shallow yet steady manner. The foregoing image of the Prophet of Islam was an extension of the erstwhile rejection of the Qur’an as authentic revelation. In fact, with the Prophet in the picture as a possessed and hallucinatory spirit, it was much more convincing in the eyes of the opponents to attribute the Qur’an to such a man as Muhammad. Having said that, there was also a deeper theological reason for focusing on the figure of the Prophet. Since Christianity is essentially a ‘Christic’ religion and Jesus Christ embodies the word of God, the Latin critics of Islam presumed a parallel paradigm for Islam according to which Muhammad was accorded a similar role in the religious universe of Islam. At any rate, the rejection of the Qur’an as the word of God and the representation of the Prophet of Islam as a possessed spirit and magician immersed in the lusts of the inferior world stayed with the Western perceptions of Islam until the modern period. Perhaps the most important outcome of the medireview Christian repudiation of Islam has been the exclusion of Islam from the family of monotheistic religions. Even in the modern period where the interfaith trialogue between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam has come a long way, we are still far from speaking with confidence of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition by which Islam can be seen as belonging to the same religious universe as the other Abrahamic religions. It goes without saying that the absence of such a discourse does nothing short of reinforcing the medireview perceptions of Islam as a heretic and pagan faith, thwarting the likelihood of generating a more inclusive picture of Islam on predominantly religious grounds.
The Middle Ages: From Theological Rivalry to the Creation of “the Other”
From the Middle Ages through the Modern Period: The European Discovery of Islam as a World Culture
The 19th Century Perceptions of Islam: From the Pilgrim to the Orientalist
The Legacy of Orientalism and the New World: Islam as the ‘Other’ of the West?
Best Regards,
Moin Ansari
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I am sharing a www.episcopalchurch.org web page article with you. Click here to read the article: http://www.episcopalchurch.org/6947_50874_ENG_HTM.htm
I thank Dr. Khan for mentioning this article which I was able to mine. It is a fantastic article. Please read it if you were going to read ONLY ONE article this year on interfaith..in many ways it brings Muslim and Christina together by working with the most contentious issue: “Trinity” vs. “pure” monotheism
11 September 2004
I am very deeply moved by the honor of being invited to address you in this place, as a guest and, I hope, as a friend. It is some twenty five years since I first visited this great city and al-Azhar mosque; and I can remember my wonder and delight at the quality of its buildings and the atmosphere of dedication and calm reflection expressed in the very stones of the walls.
I am here as a Christian, to speak to you of some of those matters which both unite us and divide us. In the world as it is now developing, it is of the most central importance that we as Christians and Muslims understand one another better. I am delighted at the continuing commitment to this process that has been shown here, a commitment evident in these last few days. And better understanding means understanding our differences as well as our common vision. In these few remarks, I want to meditate a little on the greatest theme of both Muslim and Christian faith, the doctrine of God; and I want to suggest how, despite some of our differences, we can, in the light of our belief about Almighty God, together make certain affirmations to the world about the way to peace and justice for human beings.
If I understand the doctrine of Islam correctly, its most important conviction can be expressed in the word tawhid. God is one. No being is associated with God as a second reality deserving of worship and obedience. God has no need of any being outside his own eternal and self-sufficient life. In these words, I do no more than repeat some of the most luminous and uncompromising words of the Qur’an, which I give in the new translation by Muhammad Abdel Haleem.
‘God: there is no god but Him, the Ever Living, the Ever Watchful.’ (al-Baqara 255)
‘He is God the One,
God the eternal.
He fathered no one nor was he fathered.
No one is comparable to Him.’ (al ‘Ikhlaas 1-4)
This last text reminds the Christian that this great affirmation of the uniqueness of God is what has always caused Muslims to look with suspicion at Christian doctrines of God. Christian belief about God as Father, Son and Holy Spirit appears at once to compromise the belief that God has no other being associated with him. How can we call God al-Qayyuum, the Self-sufficient, if he is not alone? So we hear in al-Baqara 115-117,
‘The East and the West belong to God:
wherever you turn, there is His Face.
God is all pervading and all knowing.
They have asserted, “God has a child.”
May He be exalted! No!
Everything in the heavens and earth belongs to Him,
everything devoutly obeys His will.
He is the Originator of the heavens and the earth,
and when He decrees something, He says only “Be,” and it is.’
The belief that God could have a son is, for the faithful Muslim, a belief suggesting that God needs something other than himself and is subject to the processes of limited bodies by ‘begetting’ a child. How can such a God be truly free and sovereign? For we know that he is able to bring the world into being by his word alone.
Yet these anxieties do not belong only to Muslims. Egypt was, in the first centuries of the Christian era, the location of great debates on just such matters. Indeed, without the contribution of Egypt, Christian theology would have been infinitely poorer, for many of the greatest minds of that period were natives of Alexandria. And one of the great concerns of these thinkers and their successors was this: if Christians say that the eternal Word and power of God was fully present in Jesus, son of Mary, can we avoid saying this in such a way as to imply that God is subject to a physical process, or that God has a second being alongside him? These Christian sages believed as strongly as any Muslim that God was self-sufficient and free, and that he could not be affected or limited by physical processes and did not act as a physical cause among others. They say quite explicitly that when we speak of the father ‘begetting’ the Son, we must put out of our minds any suggestion that this is a physical thing, a process like the processes of the world.
Those Christian thinkers and their successors developed a doctrine which tried to clarify this: they said that the name ‘God’ is not the name of a person like a human person, a limited being with a father and mother and a place that they inhabit within the world. ‘God’ is the name of a kind of life – eternal and self-sufficient life, always active, needing nothing. And that life is lived eternally in three ways which are made known to us in the history of God’s revelation to the Hebrew people and in the life of Jesus. There is a source of life, an expression of life and a sharing of life. In human language we say, ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’, but we do not mean one God with two beings alongside him, or three gods of limited power. Just as we say, ‘Here is my hand, and these are the actions my one hand performs’, but it is not different from the actions of my five fingers, so with God: this is God, the One, the Living and Self-subsistent, but what God does is not different from the life which is eternally at the same time a source and an expression and a sharing of life. Since God’s life is always an intelligent and purposeful life, each of these dimensions of divine life can be thought of as a centre of mind and love; but this does not mean that God ‘contains’ three different individuals, separate from each other as human individuals are.
And Christians believe that this life enters into ours in a limited degree. When God takes away our evildoing and our guilt, when he forgives us and sets us free, he breathes new life into us, as he breathed life into Adam at the first. That breathing into us we call the ‘Spirit’. As we become mature in our new life, we become more and more like the expression of divine life, the Word whom we encounter in Jesus. Because Jesus prayed to the source of his life as ‘Father’, we call the eternal expression of God’s life the ‘Son’. And so too we pray to the source of divine life in the way that Jesus taught us, and we say ‘Father’ to this divine reality.
But in no way does the true Christian say that the life and action of God could be divided into separate parts, as if it were a material thing. In no way does the true Christian say that there is more than one God or that God needs some other in order to act or that God promotes some other being to share his glory. There is one divine action, one divine will; yet (like the fingers of the hand) there are three ways in which that life is real, and it is only in those three ways that the divine life is real – as source and expression and sharing. It is because of those three ways in which divine life exists that Christians speak as they do about what it means to grow in holiness.
And the Christian also says something which may again be a source of disagreement. God is a loving God, as we all agree; but, says the Christian, God does not love simply because he decides to love. He is always, eternally, loving. His very nature, his definition is love. And the interaction and relation between the three ways in which God lives, the source and the expression and the sharing, is eternally the way God exists. The three centres of divine action, which we call Father, Son and Spirit, pour out the divine life to each other for all eternity, a sort of perfect circle of giving and receiving. And the only word we can use for that relationship of pouring out and giving is love. So as we grow in holiness, we become closer and closer in our actions and thoughts to the complete self-giving that always exists perfectly in God’s life. Towards this fullness we are all called to travel and grow.
Now these are difficult matters, and the greatest minds of the Christian Church have always found them hard to put into words. But what I wish to say to you today is simply that the disagreement between Christian and Muslim is not, I believe, a disagreement about the nature of God as One and Living and Self-subsistent. For us as for you, it is essential to think of God as a life that has no limit, as a life that is free. God is never to be listed alongside other beings. All through the centuries that we call the Middle Ages, Christians, Muslims and Jews thought alike about this, and our greatest philosophers, Thomas Aquinas, Ibn Sina, Maimonides and others, all worked to make this clear. They would all have agreed that only if God is alone and needs no other is he worthy of our complete worship and devotion. God is not a being who is like us, only greater and more powerful. If God were like us only much greater, we might worship him out of fear instead of giving him free obedience and love. But the true God’s freedom is infinite and he can never be limited by any definition. When we have used up all the names that human language can find for him, we shall have spoken true things of him, but never expressed the whole truth which is hidden from created minds. And so we adore him in trust and thankfulness but we accept that we shall never have him in our grasp.
Together we can acknowledge these things. And it is sad that sometimes an unfaithful or careless Christian way of speaking has led Muslims and Jews to believe that we have a doctrine of God that does not recognise the oneness and sufficiency of God, or that we worship something less than the One, the Eternal. In our conversations with Muslim friends, we Christians are rightly challenged to think more deeply, to think as our Egyptian Christian fathers did, about the unity of Almighty God.
But there is a practical consequence of this belief about the One Living God. If God is truly not a part of the world, truly self-sufficient, then his will never depends upon how things turn out in the world. We cannot work out what is just and good simply from what seems to work, from what the world finds successful or easy or popular. What is good and just is rooted in eternal truth, in the nature of God, who is what he is quite independently of what the world is and what the world thinks. The world may tell us that we should behave in such and such a way – that we should seek only to make and keep money, that we should break our promises, that we should take revenge and show no mercy, that we should take our pleasures where we like. Sometimes behaviour of this sort seems to bring success in the world. But the believer knows that no amount of worldly success can make bad things good, because nothing in the world can change the will of God, who is beyond all change and cannot be affected or weakened by any other being. So we hold to our calling to virtue and generosity and justice whatever may happen, even if, today and tomorrow, it does not make our life easy and comfortable. We struggle in our interior, spiritual battle, to be faithful to God’s will.
The greatest challenge today for our world is how to react to circumstances in a way that is faithful to God’s will. Undoubtedly, greed and revenge affect all of us. We feel that we want to defend ourselves in the way that a person without faith or hope or love would understand – in anger and bitterness and unforgiving cruelty. But when we act in such a way, we show that we do not really believe in a God who is living and self-sufficient. We do not believe that God’s will is enough; we act as though the circumstances of this world could so change things that cruelty and fear could become the right tools with which to defend ourselves.
So when the Christian, the Muslim or the Jew sees his neighbour of another faith following the ways of this world instead of the peaceful will of God, he must remind his neighbour of the nature of the one God we look to, whose will cannot be changed and who will himself see that justice is done. Once we let go of justice, fairness and respect in our dealings with one another, we have dishonoured God as well as human beings. I am deeply grateful that it was once again in this country that Jewish, Christian and Muslim leaders from the Holy Land under the co-chairmanship of the Grand Imam, Dr Tantawy, signed the Alexandria Declaration together, with its commitment to respect for the rights of the peoples of the Holy Land, its call for justice, and its refusal of terror and violence. How much we still need that vision to inspire us today, as the tragedies of this region of the world continue to resist settlement!
There is no doubt that the present violence throws a deep shadow over conversations between the West and the Muslim world. Three years ago today, I was one of those who shared just a little in the terrible experience of the events in New York. I was in a building just a short distance from the World Trade Centre that morning, and for a while I and my colleagues were trapped there; we were among those fortunate enough to be able to get out of the area just as the second tower collapsed, and we saw at first hand something of the nightmare and the suffering of that day.
On the day after, I was asked by a journalist for some of my reactions. I said that when someone spoke to us in the language of hatred or abuse, we had a choice about what language we might use to reply. So when someone ‘spoke’ to us in violence and murder, we could choose what we should do. We may rightly want to defend ourselves and one another – our people, our families, the weak and vulnerable among us. But we are not forced to act in revengeful ways, holding up a mirror to the terrible acts done to us. If we do act in the same way as our enemies, we imprison ourselves in their anger, their evil. And we fail to show our belief in the living God who always requires of us justice and goodness.
So whenever a Muslim, a Christian or a Jew refuses to act in violent revenge, creating terror and threatening or killing the innocent, that person bears witness to the true God. They have stepped outside the way the faithless world thinks. A person without faith, hope and love may say, If I do not use indiscriminate violence and terror, there is no safety for me. The believer says, My safety is with God, whose justice can never be defeated. If I defend myself, I seek to do so only in a way that honours God and God’s image in others, and that does not offend against God’s justice. To seek to find reconciliation, to refuse revenge and the killing of the innocent, this is a form of adoration towards the One Living and Almighty God.
This is why it is important to be clear about the God we worship. There is, as you will have seen, a great difference between what I as a Christian must say and what the Muslim will say; but we agree absolutely that God has no need of any other being, and that God is not a mixture or a society of different beings. And if we are committed to this God, we shall be able to do justice and act rightly even when the world around us expects us to follow its own violent ways.
And just as I have said that Christians have sometimes spoken carelessly about God and led others to think they believe less than they truly do, so all of us, Jews, Muslims and Christians, have sometimes spoken carelessly and let people think that we live by the same standards as those who have no faith or love, appearing to encourage violence and terror. If we look back to the Alexandria Declaration, we see how it is possible for all of us, in the light of our conviction about God, to be committed to something different from the world’s ways; there we find a promise to approach each other with respect and patience and to turn away from open battle, even when we feel threatened by each other. There too we find the common commitment not to use the name of God to justify violence and injustice. It has been impressive to hear in recent days the strength and clarity with which so many Muslim nations and Muslim leaders have condemned the unspeakable atrocities in Beslan. The common commitment of Muslims and Christians, as of all people of compassion, hope and intelligence, is not for a moment in doubt in this context.
In our own country, we have recently conducted a process in which Muslims and Christians together have listened to the concerns and hopes of many local communities, and we are now hoping to set up a national forum in which the anxieties of Muslim communities may be expressed and freely discussed. And we have also been discussing how each of the religious communities in Britain should react when any one of them is under threat or open attack – so that we hope a Christian community will give support to local Muslims if a mosque is attacked, and Muslims may do the same for local Jews if a synagogue is attacked or a cemetery desecrated, and Muslims and Jews will stand alongside Christians when they are abused and attacked. We pray that this willingness to stand alongside each other will be shared in other nations.
We believe that in such local ways we can, despite our disagreements, show to the world a different standard of behaviour, one that is worthy of the all-powerful and self-sufficient God we worship, worthy of him in a way that crusades and terrorism and oppression are not. All of us need to be able to repent before God for our errors and for the ways in which we are enslaved by a greedy and fearful world. But as our Christian scriptures say, we must not be conformed to this world but transformed, with our minds renewed (Romans 12.2).
If we truly understand the nature of our God, our minds will be renewed. We do not only teach truths about God, we allow those truths to change our lives. May we all find the strength and the courage from Almighty God to honour him by seeking peace together in fairness and respect and thanksgiving for each other.
‘To be one of those who believe
and urge one another to steadfastness and compassion.’ (al-Balad 17).
And as Jesus says in our own Christian Scriptures,
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
For they will be filled.
Blessed are the merciful,
For they will be shown mercy…
Blessed are the peacemakers,
For they will be called children of God (Matthew 5.6-7, 9).
Best Regards,
Moin Ansari
President
http://www.crestech.org/: Crestech Training Solutions in Medical, Business, Project Management, Business, Sigma & Technology
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TRINITY
I THEMATICS
Deities in the set of three occur in the most pagan religions. Numerologically, the number three is supposed to reveal:
- A pair of opposites
- A unity which reconciles and transcends the opposites
In Hegelian jargon, thesis and anti-thesis resolve into synthesis. Dialectics move and sustain phenomenology of spirit.
In the Marxist model capital and labor ascend to dictatorship of the proletarat and, ultimate emergence of a classless society.
Egyptian scheme centers around Osiris, Isis and Horus. The Trimurthy of Hinduism consists of Brahma (creator), Vishnu (sustainer) and Shiva (destroyer). Trinity is the most primitive of human dogmas. One God but three phases; one God but also three. Christology comprises tritheistic implication of positing three persons – God, Son, Holy Spirit – In God. God is one-nature, three persons == MIA OUSIA, TREIS HUPOSTASEIS.
Godhead is a triad.
Christ is one person and two natures. God takes on flash in Christ and, God dwells within Christ as spirit. Christ had preexisted in Father’s (God’s) mind and then became incarnate in time. God has chosen not to be God apart from mankind.
Christian God cannot be conceived expect as Trinity. EGRO, He cannot be conceived apart from Humanity. The etiology engenders creeds, doxologies, liturgy, ritual and soteriology consistent with hupostasis, ousia, substantia, subsistentia and ultimately, persona.
Thematically, Focus is on the CROSS. God is with us in our suffering. Father and son are separated in the dialectic of crucifixion. This separation is negated by the Holy Spirit, which reunites Father and Son in the resurrection of Christ. Thus, Christ has become one with all mankind in the perennial incarnation.
II EVOLUTION
Arius (320 AD) contradicted trinity with conviction that Christ the Son was not fully divine like Father the God. He was not same substance: he was not Homoousios. Father alone is ungenerate – source without source, self-existent, utterly immaterial, indivisible and thus, cannot be communicated. Whatever has come into being is necessarily created, in time, and this does not preclude the Son.
St. Augustine, (354-450 Algeria) was the follower of Mani, the Persian religious reformer over Zarathushst, founder of Manichaeism – dichotomy of spiritual forces of good (light) and evil (darkness). Mani denied EX NIHILIO principle on groups that doctrine of creation from nothing contains no sufficient explanation of why God should create at any given moment in time rather than any other. Also, he wondered as to what God was doing before he created the world. Not satisfied, St. Augustine converted to Christianity in 387, advocating that God created the world from nothing. And, Time itself is creation. A single divine substance is share by all three persons, analogically, memory, intellect, will or lover beloved, love. This was in sharp contrast to Aristotle who theorized that God and Matter are eternal and co-existent. God did not create Matter; he merely shaped it.
Averroes (Ibnrushed 1126-1198) re-established Aristotelian epistemology. He posited one active intellect for all mankind. By implication, he denied individual souls’ immortality, also entire range of eschatology. In retrospect, Hinduism posits a single universal soul into which all souls are ultimately absorbed.
As reaction to Averros, Thomas Aquinas (1224-1274) attempted to reconcile Christianity with Aristotelian notion of an unmoved prime mover, distant and removed, unapproachable. He advocated individual intellect since that alone warrants personal immortality.
III CRITIQUE
Strictly, God is not revealed as trinity in OT or NT. Pauline epistles refer to that triad: Spirit, Lord, God. Synoptic gospels, Matthew alone mentions Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
The catechism statement – In God there are three persons and one nature: In Jesus Christ there is one person and two natures – is sharp contrast to Shema (OT) and Shahada (Q). Both doctrine establish that God is ineffable, thus, totally foreign to human concept, ontology or teleology. Three persons, by tritheistic definition, imply three individual, mutually exclusive, concentric levels of consciousness, engendering ceaseless epistemological polarities.
Since Christian God cannot be posited except as trinity, he cannot be perceived distinct from humanity, the thesis entirely compromised God’s freedom in choosing to become man imbibing crass anthropolomorphism.
Trinitarian doctrine is both analogical and christomonistic. As a result, it excludes world religious orders by withholding salvation since it cannot surrender or even preclude cursorily, its cardinal conviction that God is fully present in Christ.
God chooses not to be God apart from mankind; if so, Jesus is not a preexistent logos but merely a hypostasis along side the father. Thus, Jesus occurs only as a dialectic in world history.
The dogma totally ignores the “God question” vis-à-vis existentialist atheism, secular humanism or epistemological pluralism (say, the ten incarnations of Vishnu). Since, Nature of Christian God is to love and since love must always seek an object (if love) God needs world as a partner in love. Ergo, world is co-eternal with God. (Hence, no Qiama, no resurrection no judgment, no hell).
The masculine connotation curiously circumvents Mariology as if, no vehicle or medium permeates transposition of the Holy Ghost.
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