Archives For Islam

From The Forbidden Image by Alain Besancon, speaking of differences between Judaism and Islam:

“Judaism always seems on the brink of Incarnation. That is why the Jewish people need the commandments from their God, to resist the temptation to make an image of him or to imagine him. In Islam, the image becomes inconceivable because of the metaphysical notion of God. As soon as proof of submission (Islam) to that God is given, the association (shirk) between God and any external notion of his essence, any person (as among Christians), and a fortiori any matter, is perceived with horror as an attack on unity, as a return to polytheism.” (78)

Ellul on Islam

October 17, 2009 — 2 Comments

Ellul has an interesting chapter on the influence of Islam on Christianity. Like much else in this book, I think Ellul is something of a perfectionist who is overly critical, only seeing the failures of the Church, but this can of course also be helpful in pointing out real error.

Here he says that the rise of Canon Law comes to the West through Islam in the East. “I am inclined to think, for example, that the law of serfdom is a Western imitation of the Muslim dhimmi. Religious law is also important. I am convinced that some parts of canon law have their origin in Arab law.” (97)

Ellul goes further by suggesting that it’s a philosophical problem. Thoma Aquinas not only gave us a great synthesis of Aristotle and classical philosophy, he did it as a result of Islam. “We speak of Greek philosophy and Christian theology. But this Greek philosophy was faithfully transmitted by Arab interpreters. It was by way of Arab-Muslim thinking that the problem came to be addressed at this time.” (97)

Ellul draws a straight line from Muslim unitarian monotheism and legalism to what he calls the “juridicizing of Christendom,” pressuring theology into purely legal categories (99). And once religion has taken on this political role, it is not surprising to see it turn violent. Ellul says that it cannot be considered an accident that shortly after Christians come in contact with militant Islam, the crusades emerge on the scene as plausible options. “One fact, however, is a radical one, namely, that the Crusade is an imitation of the jihad. Thus the Crusade includes a guarantee of salvation. The one who dies in a holy war goes straight to Paradise, and the same applies to the one who takes part in a crusade. This is no coincidence; it is an exact equivalent.” (103)

Most stats indicate that Islam is the fastest growing religion in America and one of the fastest growing religions in the world. One of the greatest attractions to Islam must certainly be its militancy and ambition, despite the many protests by ignorant or agenda-driven pundits. No one wants to join the losing side. Islam presents a vision of world conquest and militant struggle.

At least some of the responsibility for this state of affairs in this nation is American evangelicalism that has insisted quite loudly for the last hundred years or so through its fanatical and spurious eschatology that the world is going to hell in a hand basket. With the Antichrist under every funny looking rock and the rapture, an immanent reality, this world is irrelevant, passing, and at best, distracting. But if the world is a free-fall into hell, the human spirit at least cries out for a fight. And thus the starving, deformed masculinity of American evangelicalism cries out for an alternative, and Muhammad’s religion offers many the appearance of a backbone.

But the Christian faith declares the victory of the cross. In the death and resurrection of Jesus, the death knell has been struck on all evil and darkness. The history of the universe will not be the story of the world’s free fall into hell but rather the complete and utter victory of Jesus in this world. He is in heaven reigning until all of his enemies have been made his footstool, and the last enemy will be death itself (Heb. 10:12-13, 1 Cor. 15:25-26). This means that before Christ returns, Afghanistan will bow the knee to Jesus. Before Christ delivers up the kingdom to the Father, Iraq and Indonesia will bow their knees to King Jesus. This is the story of the triumph of the gospel, the conquest of the world with the Word of forgiveness and grace in Jesus.

Ministry to Christians attracted to Islam and Muslims themselves must include this kind of faith and certainty in the work of the gospel in the world. Pastors and laity alike need to know and believe that their efforts are not in vain because God has promised the nations to Jesus. And Muslims need to know that their struggle is in vain; the winning conquest was begun in Jesus and continues in the Church until every knee bows and every tongue confesses that Jesus Christ is Lord.

Christians agree with Muslims that the goal of all of life (including politics) is theocracy. We agree that if God is Lord of our hearts, he must also be Lord of our state. Furthermore, we have always understood our goal and mission, as stated in the Great Commission, as the gospel of Jesus filling the earth. Our fundamental disagreement with Islam is over which God is Lord. Where Islam claims that Allah is God and Muhammad is his prophet, Christians insist that the Trinity is the one God of the universe, and that he has revealed himself in the person of Jesus Christ. He has been given the name above every name, and it is to him that all things in heaven and on earth must bow (cf. Phil. 2:9-11).

This gives some Christians the “willies” when they remember some of the atrocities of the crusades and other “Christian” states carried out in the name of Christ. But the opposite and far worse error is the assumption that there is some realm that Jesus is not King of. Christians have for too long lived and thought like functional atheists when it comes to politics. The failure of the medieval Church, the crusades, et al was not that they believed Jesus was Lord of the state. The problem was that they came to believe that the weapon of the state (the sword) was to be preferred to the weapon of the Church (the Word of God). The Christian faith declares that God overthrew the powers of sin and darkness in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. More powerful than any two-edged sword is the Word of God, the same Word that created the worlds from nothing, the same Word that called Jesus back from the dead. The medieval Church, instead of understanding that self-sacrificing love is the way to glory and dominion, stooped to the rocks and sticks of military coercion. The irony is that in fighting Islam, we stooped to the tactics of Islam.

Islam, Muhammad, and Women

January 18, 2007 — 1 Comment

I just finished a week intensive course on Islam last week at Erskine. It was an excellent class both as an overview of the history of the second most influential religion in the world and as an introduction to Islamic theology and culture.

By some estimates, Islam is the fastest growing religion in America. It is also estimated that of American converts, women make up 65-75%. Indicative of this trend is the fact that Dr. Ingrid Mattson is the president of the Islamic Society of North America, the largest Muslim umbrella organization in North America. This marketing stunt, a disgrace to most orthodox Muslims throughout the world, flies in North America and aids their proselytizing of ignorant, abandoned, and abused American women, looking and longing for protection and love.

But you know that these scads of female converts are not being told the truth. When asked what might annul a Muslim man’s prayers, Muhammad answered that there were three things that might annul his prayers. First, if a donkey walked in front of him, second, if a dog walked in front of him, and third, if a woman walked in front of him. This is one of the reasons why to this day, women pray behind the men during prayers. When it was suggested that Muhammad demeaned women with his statement, making them equal to dogs and donkeys, he replied by stating that women are worth only half as much as men because of their feeble minds. Elsewhere, after having a vision of hell, Muhammad commented that hell was mostly filled with women. Adding insult to injury, Muhammad is well known to have had at least 13 “wives” and many other concubines. His favorite wife was a 6 year old girl. But being a gentleman, the Prophet waited until she was 9 to consummate the marriage. And of course it is no surprise that the Qur’an explicitly allows, and even encourages, Muslim men to beat their wives if they are suspected of unfaithfulness.

But the list goes on. There is of course a facade of morality and modesty in the Muslim world, but the allowances for “temporary” marriage are poorly disguised houses of prostitution, not to mention the allowance of polygamy and easy divorce affected by the ever merciful three-fold declaration of “I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you.”

One episode records the Prophet seeing his nephew’s daughter-in-law in less than her usual apparel. Apparently his nephew saw the keen glances the Prophet was giving his wife and offered to divorce her for him. The Prophet, being the upright man he was, of course refused. But arriving home that night, he received a vision which ordered him (quite against his will) to take his nephew’s offer and to marry his wife. Tales multiply of Muhammad’s exploitation of women, and the legacy of the Muslim slave trade pushes the details from disgusting to horrific.

The total number of persons enslaved by Muslims is some 4 or 5 times the number enslaved by Westerners (not to excuse their faults in the least), and where the mortality rate of the western slave trade was something like 1 in 10, the Muslim slave trade sent in the neighborhood of 4 in 5 to the grave, marching them across such harrowing terrains as the Sahara Desert. And of the (by some estimates) 180 million slaves taken by Muslims through 14 centuries of aggressive slave trade activities, most were women sold as concubines. It was the usual practice to kill any children born to these slave concubines, and all male slaves were castrated.

Of course there are and have been “decent” Muslims and ignorant Muslims and liberal Muslims who would never dream of these sorts of atrocious schemes or practices and would readily denounce various abuses in the history of their faith. And well and good; and they need to renounce their nominal paganism and come to the truth in Christ. But there is a deep deception being promulgated particularly in this nation, largely motivated (I believe) by the billions of dollars being pumped into our nation’s universities and various charitable organizations, all payoff money for the continuation of Islamic slavery (“submission”) through lies and deceit.