Love and Speech

Love and Speech

Opening

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh

Bismillahir-Rahmanir-Rahim

Alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen, was salatu was salamu ala sayyidina Muhammadin wa ala alihi wa sahbihi ajmaeen

Peace be upon Muhammad and all his messengers and all his friends and companions.

Introduction: The Shared Foundation of Love

The command to love the Lord thy God with thy whole heart, thy whole soul and thy whole strength was not invented by Jesus or by the Prophet of Islam, peace be upon them both. It goes further back, being hard-wired into the logic boards of the Book of Deuteronomy.

Much of our mutual conversation has been wounded by a misplaced attempt to claim credit for what is in fact a shared and even primordial principle. Muslims and Christians, historically, have seen themselves as families of love and self-giving against sibling rivals sunk in darkness. But the principle which brings us together has never, for a moment, been withheld by Almighty God.

For Him to have concealed the truth about His love - that is to say about salvation - at any earlier epoch of human history would have challenged that love.

Quranic Foundation

"You are not an innovator amongst the messengers."

This verse reminds us that our traditions did not invent the concept of divine love, but are part of a continuous chain of revelation.

The Psalms of David: A Shared Heritage

Reading the Psalms of David, joyfully invoked by several Christians, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, in their generous responses to the common word, we are humbled by the realization that our traditions will struggle to prove that our love of God is distinctive, greater than David's, or more theologically proper.

Let's listen to him again:

"How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts! My soul longeth, nay fainteth, for the courts of the Lord. My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God." Psalm 84

This Psalm, in a necessarily complicated way, unites Muslims and Christians to Jews:

• Muslims, because they respect the Psalms as revelation and identify the valley of Baca with Mecca
• Christians, because of the wonderful discovery of a proleptic vision of Christ as the new temple
• Jews, because it was their story in the first place, and love will never go out of date

Love as a Transitive Force

Love, after all, is not contained within itself. By its nature it is super-replete, transitive, requiring an object in order to be itself. And the Deuteronomy principle does not in any way limit speech's claim to be love's prime vehicle.

As the Prophet ﷺ says:

(Sahih Abu Dawud 5125)

"If you love your brother, you should tell him."

Hence the spectacle, sometimes even the embarrassing convention, of Muslims announcing to strangers that they love them when emerging from mosques.

The Challenge of Competitive Love

The way in which Christian love might differ from Jewish love is a matter for Christians and Jews to discuss. Old dichotomies of grace versus law, of spirit against letter, have not disappeared, nor should they quite. But they've been replaced by an awareness that Judaism also recognizes that grace is what saves, with a commandment being a means to opening the heart.

Within each of our three traditions there is a letter-spirit dichotomy. No longer can we so easily claim that it characterizes the relationship between the traditions.

We must avoid what Kenneth Craig calls our "competitive loving of the Holy Land" - where competitive love has led at best to stalemate and at worst to the prospect of global confrontation. But let us recall that God is greater than Palestine and that therefore our loving relationship with Him need never be a competitive zero-sum game.

Islamic Perspectives on Divine Love

"And He is the Forgiving, the Loving."

While "al-Wadud" (the Loving) is a Quranic name for God, the stress seems to be more on the principle of Rahmah (compassion). The word Rahmah, like the Hebrew cognate Rechem, is linked to the word for womb, and hence to motherly love - perhaps the most impressive and elemental of all the love that we may see in this world.

The Prophet's Prayer on Love

"O Lord God, grant us Your love, and love of those that love You, and love of deeds that bring us closer to You, and make Your love dearer to us than cool water." (Sahih Tirmidhi 3490)

There seems no reason why Christians or Jews or many others should not identify with this beautiful prayer of the Prophet ﷺ.

Historical Borrowing and Shared Sensibilities

The historical facts show abundant mutual borrowing. We know that early Muslim worshippers borrowed concepts and themes from Syriac monastic piety. Tor André, Louis Massignon and others have demonstrated that the word Rahib (a monk) in early Islam became curiously, but factually, a term of respect used among Muslims for each other.

Conversely, if the Christian Science Monitor reports that the best-selling poet in America today is Jalal ad-Din Rumi, one of Islam's great choristers of passion for God and His beauty, then Islam's sensibility about sacred love is not foreign to Christians.

Internal Diversity Within Traditions

Our traditions are internally diverse, which both complicates dialogue and shows how much we share:

Salvation: Works vs. Grace

In Islam:

• Mu'tazilites believe essentially in salvation by works
• Ash'arites and Maturidis believe in salvation by grace

As the basic Ash'arite creed of Laqani puts it:

"If He rewards us, it is by His sheer grace. If He punishes us, it is by His sheer justice."

This is straightforward Sunni teaching, though there are significant dissenting voices both classically and today.

Human Nature and Original Sin

Islam itself is not united in its diagnosis of human nature. The leading 12th century theologian, Fakhr ad-Din ar-Razi, takes an extremely pessimistic view of human nature, which contrasts strikingly with the Maturidi hopefulness of an-Nasafi.

Political Models

There simply is no single Muslim theory of state, any more than there is a single Christian one. Today, religious Muslims generally support democratization and hope for the departure of secular autocracies which have obstructed their freedom. But there are Muslims who favor various models - clerical rule, absolute monarchy, or other forms of centralized government.

The Challenge of Clear Communication

Ours is an age of speech, but we are not speaking very clearly. One can read the New York Times for a year and not be able to name a single Muslim leader who is regarded as such in the Muslim world. Similarly, one can read the press in Muslim lands and receive the impression that America is run by fundamentalist Christians who regard Israel as divinely mandated and America as having a punitive military mission against Islam.

The reality is that most Muslims reject radical Islamism and most Christians reject the idea that American foreign policy is or should be driven by dominionist readings of the Bible. But both the Muslim media and the Western media have tended not to present this simple truth.

The Common Word Initiative

"And cooperate in righteousness and piety, but do not cooperate in sin and aggression."

Conclusion

My real gratitude and thanks to the organizers and to the various presiding spirits of this conference and to all of the Christians who have responded with such extraordinary generosity of heart through the Common Word initiative, helping to make it, by God's leave, a source of healing in our age of misinformation and suspicion.

When we discern love in others, we may meaningfully analogize to the experience of others in other traditions who have also witnessed love. The love of God for His creation, which in Muslim teaching precedes our love for Him and is its foundation, partakes of His infinity in such a way as to make our different loves for Him not so alien.

Closing

"Our Lord, accept from us. Indeed, You are the Hearing, the Knowing."

Wa akhiru da'wana an alhamdulillahi rabbil alameen

Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuh