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R e v i e w s
ISLAM’S ATTRACTION
It is impossible to live (as I did, for a decade) in Muslim countries without feeling the powerful draw of the Islamic faith. Islam is, of course, an amalgam of Judaism and Christianity. Hilaire Belloc (in The Great Heresies) points out that Islam is not merely a new religion that appeared in the seventh century A.D., but a heresy, consisting of "Catholic doctrine, oversimplified." It has a single deity, the same God of Abraham and Jesus; a single scripture, the Quran, which repeats many biblical teachings, revealed directly from God, not written by apostles or prophets; and about a billion adherents. It is a streamlined religion, in addition to being still young and vital. Islam is, in fact, a proselytizer’s dream.
No Catholic should be uninformed about this major world faith. Not only does Islam sizzle with missionary zeal in, say, Africa, where it is by far the strongest challenger to Catholicism, but it is growing fast in America, through immigrants and converts. By 2000, it will be the second largest faith in the United States.
Answering Islam is the primer most Christians need about Islam, and more: a heavily detailed and footnoted, closely reasoned analysis of Islam. Its first section sets out the basic doctrines, with accurate and informative discussions of the Islamic view of the prophets (including Moses, David, Solomon, and Jesus), Muhammad himself, and the Quran. The second is a point-by-point Christian response to the same Islamic beliefs. The third is a "positive defense" of the Christian perspective, focusing on the Bible, the divinity of Christ, the Trinity, and salvation by the cross.
A great strength of this book is its highly intelligent explanation of the Islamic religion; it does that better than many books of scholarship, even books of Muslim apologetics, which tend to be subjective and needlessly exotic. Many new Muslims find their adopted faith exotic and pepper their discourse with Arabic words—such as saying Allah for God, when Allah is simply the Arab word for the one true God that Arab Jews and Christians were using for centuries before Muhammad’s birth.
Geisler and Saleeb successfully avoid triviality. For readers unfamiliar with Islam, for whom television news images of Muslims suggest a wild faith dominated by turbaned mullahs baying for blood, by ruthless terrorists, and by unrelenting foreignness, the first third of this book provides an excellent education.
It could have been written by a faithful Muslim, and indeed co-author Abdul Saleeb (properly ’Abd al-Salib: "servant of the cross"—a pseudonym) is a Christian convert from Islam. It provides a valuable perspective for Christians, and for Catholic apologists especially, who want to know why Islam is growing so quickly in North America.
Muslim beliefs diverge from Christian ones in simple but fundamental ways. Jesus Christ was a prophet but not the Son of God; Muhammad, born 570 years after Christ, was the "seal of the prophets," the final prophet, to whom an incorruptible scripture, the Quran, had been revealed. Christ in Islam enjoys the title al-Masih, or Messiah, and Muslims believe in the dogma of the Virgin Birth and in Jesus’ miracles. They do not believe in either the Crucifixion or Resurrection; the Quran suggests that someone was crucified in Jesus’ place and that ambitious apostles invented the rest of the story. The major fault of Christianity, in Muslim eyes, is what they see as the hopeless corruption of its Scriptures: both Old Testament and New are a mishmash of myths and histories, rumors and outright lies, and thus God needed to reveal the Quran to set the record straight.
The Quran—which was revealed over the course of years—is not consistent on this, of course. In an early Quranic revelation, God tells Muhammad, "If thou wert in doubt as to what we have revealed unto thee, then ask those who have been reading The Book [the Bible]." Only later does the Quran condemn the Bible as being filled with error. And yet Muhammad depended, for the legitimacy of his prophetic mission, on the prophetic succession from Abraham, and thus he and modern Muslims often quote biblical passages to support Islamic arguments. Any biblical passage that does not suit Islamic purposes is, of course, inauthentic.
Muhammad was no gentle Nazarene. In his career he was a merchant, husband, prophet, lawmaker, judge, general, and civil leader. His brutality—especially toward the Jewish tribes of Arabia—was shocking. He granted himself loopholes in many of the Islamic dogmas he himself had revealed. For example, where a Muslim might have four wives at a time, he took seven. Yet his tremendous intelligence, eloquence, and courage allowed him to establish a religious empire that spread like lightning through Arabia, North Africa, Iran, and corners of Europe.
The authors tell this story well, but in their earnest attention to Quranic and Biblical details, they miss certain elements of the Islamic appeal. Apart from banning strong drink and demanding prayers five times daily, physical demands on Muslims are few, and God knows chastity is not one of them. In addition to four wives, good Muslims may aspire to a heaven where most of their time may be spent copulating.
What is more, Islam rolled through Africa and Asia not only thanks to the sword but to taxation. The Islamic state required Christians and Jews to pay a jizya, a punitive tribute that Muslims did not have to pay. You have to wonder: How fast would Catholicism spread if Catholics were exempted from income tax?
Comparisons between Muhammad and Joseph Smith are inevitable. Both men were self?made prophets, religious entrepreneurs, and makers of scripture (though Muhammad had a far better way with words). Both created culturally revised versions of major faiths, loaded with earthly and eschatological rewards, and nascent model communities that expanded aggressively. Like Mormonism, Islam in some ways embraces the grace of Christ’s message and in other ways retreats from it. The Quran permits slavery, yet enjoins slave owners to free their slaves, something not found in the Bible. Yet Islam does not urge mercy on harlots, telling them to sin no more: They should be stoned to death. Capital punishment is written into Islamic law for homicide and rape. Does this seem off-putting? For millions, unsurprisingly, this has far greater appeal than the injunction to turn the other cheek.
Today, too, there are other factors in Islam’s favor: the appeal of oil wealth, Afrocentrism, multiculturalism, and political radicalism. The woeful way history is taught in our schools equips students to reject Christopher Columbus and European colonialism, but does not burden them with the history of Islam’s conquests in Europe and Africa. Malcolm X converted to orthodox Islam (abandoning the heretical Nation of Islam) in Mecca, a city where, during his visit in the 1960s, slave auctions were still common.
Of course, Answering Islam is a work of scholarship and apologetics, not history or anecdote. A jacket blurb calls it a "theological masterpiece" and that may be a fair judgment: I can recall no book that has taken Islam apart so thoroughly and objectively. Neither author is Catholic, however, and the book lacks specifically Catholic apologetics. One might argue that the singular history and consistency of the Catholic Church is the most reliable response to Islam, but at least the book presents no specifically Protestant argument either.
The job the book does best is refuting the apparently glossy perfection of Islam as contrasted with the sometimes difficult and complex world of Christianity.
In this connection the authors cite a delightful quotation from C. S. Lewis: "If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions."
-- PETER THEROUX
Answering Islam: The Crescent in the Light of the Cross
By Norman L. Geisler and Abdul Saleeb
Baker Books
336 pages
$17.99
ISBN: 0801038596
PAST COLONUS
A few days ago I finished reading Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of Whittaker Chambers. The story was familiar to me, since I had read, years ago, all of the subject’s own writings, most of them autobiographical. In reading Tanenhaus I was reminded of a remark Chambers made. When he was twenty-three, he said, he discovered that Oedipus eventually went on to Colonus. If you don’t remember the story of Oedipus, that comment is a little cryptic, I suppose. (I will leave it to you to turn to your encyclopedia and refresh your memory of the story.) I took the remark by Chambers to mean that he saw a parallel between his own early life, which was filled with tragedy, and the life of Sophocles’ hero—not in the sense that he underwent the same trials, but that he came to see realize that, just as Oedipus, after falling as low as he could go, went on to Colonus, so Chambers, similarly brought low, would go on with his life.
This made me think of the history of the Church. Sometimes things in the Church seem just as bad as they can be—and then we turn to the next chapter. Like a skilled playwright, God brings the unexpected out of tragedy. For all we know, the Church may be young. The end of the world may not come for tens of thousands of years. Someday there may be a Pope John Paul LII succeeding a Pope Pius CXII, and the millennial celebrations may have become old hat and a trifle dull.
One thing I never find dull, though, is the history the Church already has gone through. Years ago I came to the conviction that there is no more sobering or satisfying study than history. It is the perfect tonic for anyone fretful about the shape of things today or anxious about the shape of things tomorrow. Most of the history I have read has been written fairly recently—necessarily so—but it is good at times to turn to works composed in ancient times. There is a freshness about them that often is missing from modern accounts. This is nowhere truer than in The History of the Church (also titled The Ecclesiastical History) by Eusebius (260-339). He was a scholar and bishop who lived during the transition from a persecuted, underground Church to an imperially-favored Church. Most of his life was spent in Caesarea in Palestine; his city was large by ancient standards, having a population of 100,000, and his influence was larger still. His greatest work, divided into ten books, traces the life of the Catholic Church from its founding by Christ through Constantine’s defeat of Licinius in 324.
When I first turned to Eusebius’s history, some years after I had become familiar with the lineaments of Church history, I found that the book confirmed my belief in such things as the apostolic succession and the early administration of the sacraments. Beyond that, it was simply a great story. Of course I knew the ending in advance; I knew that the Church would come out of the catacombs and would go on, not just to Colonus, but to the entire world. Yet the story told by Eusebius, despite its occasional dry spots (he likes lists—lots of lists), is reminiscent of the old movie serials: You hesitate to put the book down because you really want to find out what happens in the next episode.
The Penguin edition of The History of the Church is bolstered by a "Who’s Who in Eusebius": hundreds of biographical blurbs, from Abgar (whose story I recall; he supposedly had a correspondence with Jesus) to Zoticus (whom I don’t remember at all; in fact there were two Zoticuses, both opponents of Montanism). I wouldn’t mind seeing these blurbs reprinted independently, so handy are they. Among the appendices are a timeline of the bishops of Rome, Alexandria, Jerusalem, and Antioch (you can’t tell the players without a program); an overview of how the Roman administration was set up; notes on understanding the calendar (Eusebius was not punctilious about dating events), coinage, and measures; and Latin terms used by Eusebius (in case you forgot that a ducenarius was a procurator paid the handsome sum of 200,000 sesterces a year).
In this edition of The History of the Church, the pagination (omitted the back matter) averages out to almost exactly one page for each year of the Church’s life. That strikes me as a happy coincidence. Anyone can read a single page daily, and in less than a year Eusebius will guide the reader through the first third of the first millennium, the formative years of the Church. It’s a thrilling journey.
-- Karl Keating
The History of the Church
By Eusebius
Penguin
435 pages
$12.95
ISBN: 0140445358
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