Muslim-Christian Views of One Another
By Abdal Hakim Murad | 2026-01-13T23:15:08.880787+00:00 | Topic: Iman
Muslim-Christian Views of One Another
Abdal Hakim Murad
Understanding Islam Series: Session 4
Introduction
What I've been doing has been to attempt to outline the Quranic understanding of Christianity, both what Christianity was and what it should have been in the Quran's view, and then tracing and outlining the story of Islam's historic understanding of the Christian religion. And I mentioned that it got off to a slow start.
The early Muslims, when they first encountered Christians, they were basically on a lower civilizational level. And when they started to debate with Christian theologians in places like Damascus, they immediately found themselves outgunned because they knew no dialectical Aristotelian logic, which the Greeks and the Christians were deploying against them. And in fact, it's generally accepted now that the great trigger that kick-started Muslim philosophical theology was actually these early encounters with intellectually more advanced Christian thinkers.
That's what made Muslims get into systematic theology. And then later on, as Muslims became themselves more sophisticated, you have people like Shahrastani and Ghazali producing, in many ways, at least for their times, quite objective and factually correct accounts of the Christian religion.
Christian Understanding of Islam
What I want to do now is look at the story from the other side of the frontier. What was the Christian understanding of Islam? I've already mentioned that there was no scriptural foundation on which Christians could draw on. The Quran mentions Jesus and Christianity. The Bible doesn't seem to, at least as far as Christians are concerned, mention Muhammad or Islam.
Initial Christian Response
The initial reaction to the fact of the appearance of Islam and its extraordinary success in conquering half the world, within a hundred years, they were ruling an area from southern France to the west to the frontiers of China to the east. An area much larger, say, than Alexander the Great had ever conquered. And massive Christian conversions coming in.
The initial Christian response was one of complete bafflement and bewilderment. And of course, a good deal of hostility. And a good deal of theological agonizing.
After all, if God had finally revealed himself and his will in history, how could this sudden rolling back of inexorable, divinely-willed Christian progress be interpreted? What on earth is God playing at if the fairest
lands of Christianity, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and so forth, the great patriarchal centers of Antioch, Jerusalem, Alexandria and other places, suddenly becoming Muslim? This interrogated the Christian conscience and confidence about history in a very profound way. And the result was a very, very fierce and angry and often hateful polemic that we find particularly from the Byzantine writers.
St. John of Damascus
Now, the first unambiguous record we have of this polemic comes from the great St. John of Damascus. The early Umayyad state was quite open to employing non-Muslims. And in fact, he held high office. He was the minister of finance for some years in the Umayyad state, whose capital at that time was Damascus.
But this seemed not to have hampered his polemical activities. He was hobnobbing with the caliph by day and at night writing polemic against Islam. And there didn't seem to be a problem.
And he composes the first Christian book about Islam. And it's called A Discussion Between a Christian and a Saracen. And there are two volumes of this, two versions of this have come down to us.
And he makes some fairly surprising errors about Islam. And again, scholars are not quite clear how this could have happened if he was part of the royal court in Damascus. Surely he had an opportunity to learn about Islam.
And surely the Muslims would have ensured that he had that opportunity. Nonetheless, he makes some very basic errors. He inaugurates a very long-standing theme of Christian polemic against Islam, which continued right until the 17th century, in that he said that Muhammad had been tutored by an Aryan monk, a view that has no historical basis whatsoever.
But it fits in with John's understanding of Islam, not as a new religion, but as a Christian heresy. And for the Middle Ages until perhaps the 12th century, that was the general Christian take on Islam. Not a new religion, but a Christian heresy.
So we find Dante, for instance, when he describes what happens to the prophet in hell, he puts him with Christian heretics, like Pelagius and Arius and so forth. John goes on to assert that Muhammad can't have been a real prophet because he didn't work any miracles. And he even says that the Muslims actually worship the black stone, which is this meteorite which is set into one corner of the Kaaba, which marks the point at which the seven circumambulations begin.
Muslims, of course, don't worship it at all, but he seems to suggest they do. So the debate got off to a rather unpromising start. But this initial contribution triggered a very large output of Arabic Christian writing about Islam.
John wrote in Greek, but the Arabs soon followed. Now this is interesting because it was politically possible to do this. There seemed to be no restriction in the early Muslim state on Christians writing very rude things about Islam and about the prophet.
In fact, Islamic law explicitly gives Christians the right to denounce the prophet if this can be shown to be required by their theology. Nonetheless, there had to be a certain circumspection. And outside the Dar al-Islam, the world of Islam, we find a good deal of much more vituperative, hostile, demonizing literature about the prophet Muhammad, a game that continued for at least a thousand years.
Byzantine Response
So we find the Byzantine theologians ensconced in their monasteries in Mount Athos or in Constantinople raging against Islam. And they were the first ones who said it wasn't a Christian heresy, but was a false religion. They said Muhammad was a false prophet inspired directly by the devil.
Some of them said he's the Antichrist himself. They said the Quran is a kind of mishmash of Old and New Testament themes perverted by Manichaean notions. And this really remained the consistent Byzantine position until the final extinction of Byzantium in 1453.
Latin West Response
In the Latin West, the debate tended to be a bit more sophisticated, although unfortunately it was no less vitriolic. The tone was set by the great Christian thinker Peter the Venerable, who was abbot of the monastery of Cluny in France from 1122 until 1156. And he is the first Western Christian to be concerned to write systematically about Islam.
His worry was that the Crusades had failed to secure the conversion of the Muslims. He complained that the Crusaders were only interested in massacring the Muslims or in driving them out, and they simply didn't have any institutions or apparently any desire to convert the Muslims of the Holy Land.
So he launches a quite remarkable initiative and he travels around Spain to those towns that recently had been conquered from the Muslims and where first-hand information about Islam could be found.
So he's doing fieldwork in a pre-modern but fairly responsible way. And he generates what is today known as the Cluniac Corpus. This is the first collection of Christian scholarly writings about Islam.
It's made up of... Yeah. He came from this great monastery. It's ruined now, but it's worth visiting if you go to... It's in the Medina, the southern bit of central France.
Cluny is a great, I think, Benedictine house. Very beautiful setting. And Peter the Venerable generated this Cluniac Corpus, which was 12 books in Latin about Islam.
And one of these, interestingly, is the first translation of the Koran into a European language. It's done into Latin by a certain Roger of Ketten, who is actually an English scholar. Peter the Venerable himself contributed two books about Islam, one of which, a particularly influential one, he called Summa totius heresis saracenorum, a summary of all the heresies of the Saracens, which remained a kind of set text for Christian studies of Islam for several centuries.
St. Thomas Aquinas
So we find this Cluniac Corpus being the basis of St Thomas Aquinas' information about Islam. In fact, one of St Thomas' best-known works, his Summa contra Gentiles, was explicitly written as a kind of manual for Dominican missionaries trying to convert Jews and Muslims in reconquered Spain to Christianity. Now, his theory of Islam has the following four themes.
First of all, Islam is false. It is a deliberate perversion of the truth. It is spread by a prophet who is a deliberate imposter.
Number two, Islam is a religion which can only spread by violence and sword. Number three, Islam is a religion of self-indulgence. The Koran, Aquinas wrote, permits fornication and sodomy and allows believers to break oaths.
Number four, Muhammad is the Antichrist. Now, there's a truly great book about the medieval Christian understanding of Islam by somebody called Norman Daniel. It's called Islam and the West. It's well worth looking at. And he provides often very harrowing details of this kind of medieval Christian vilification of the prophet particularly.
And he points out that the demonisation of Muslims could in fact be even worse than the medieval demonisation of Jews because the Jews were castigated only for their rejection of Christ's divinity, whereas in the case of Islam, to the same charge, one could add a vitriol against the founder of the religion itself.
Medieval Christians couldn't polemicise against Moses, Abraham and so forth, but they could polemicise against Muhammad. So we find this personal ad hominem dimension added to the polemic.
Historical Consequences
Now these accusations, similarly to the anti-Semitic accusations directed against the Jews, legitimised large-scale religious violence against Muslim minorities who found themselves under Christian rule.
So the chief function of the Inquisition was the extirpation of the remnants of Muslim belief in Spain. St Dominic himself founded the Inquisition and St Thomas, of course, was himself a Dominican. And this continues down the centuries.
In 1687, Ottoman rule in Hungary ends and the Habsburgs immediately bring the Inquisition from Spain into Central Europe and they do the same thing of forcibly converting Muslims and when they're found to be practising Islam in secret, they are interrogated and, in some cases, burned.
In 1552, Ivan the Terrible captures the city of Kazan, the great definitive defeat for Islam to the east of Europe. And he immediately prohibits the practice of Judaism and Islam in his domains, a law which remained in place in Russia.
You couldn't be a Muslim in Russia until the time of Catherine the Great, who herself ran into the determined opposition of the clergy who thought that these laws should be continued. And, in fact, until the Russian Revolution in 1917, it was illegal for Muslims to live in some Russian towns, like the Chechen Kapenny Grozny. Muslims couldn't live within 30 miles of the city.
Kazan is another example. If you go to what's left of the Muslim city of Kazan, capital of Tatarstan on the Volga, you'll find that most of Tatarstan is Muslim, but the capital itself is Christian because Muslims are not allowed to live in the city and it poses various electoral and political problems now.
Examples of Coexistence
However, it's not consistently grim. Sometimes one can over-demonise the traditional European persecution of the Muslims. There were contexts in Christian Europe where coexistence did take place and which proved to Muslims that, while intolerance might be practised by some Christians, it's not a necessary, ineluctable product of the Christian faith.
Lithuania and Poland
It's interesting that this year sees two anniversaries. The first is the 900th anniversary of the sack of Lisbon, formerly a Muslim city, by crusaders who were sailing by and were invited by the King of Portugal to... If they wanted to kill Muslims in the Holy Land, they might as well do it nearer to home. And so they suddenly turned up in the harbour of Lisbon, overwhelmed the defendants, and historians estimate that 200,000 people were killed.
There's been a spate of novels in Portuguese recently commemorating this. A great Portuguese novelist called Saramago has written a book called The Siege of Lisbon, which has just been done into English. If you want to see how the modern Portuguese conscience deals with this, it's painful.
Anniversary. So that's a depressing anniversary, but just two months ago, at the other end of Europe, another anniversary was celebrated by the president of Lithuania, who attends the 300th anniversary of the founding of a mosque in the east of Lithuania, and the 500th year of the presence of Islam in Lithuania. And he noted in his speech in this mosque how there'd always been good coexistence between the Lithuanians and the Muslim minorities, never any persecutions, etc., which is more or less true.
Theological Issues
The Status of the Prophet Muhammad ﷺ
The status of the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) is a key issue in Christian-Muslim dialogue. The question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Christian view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets and through Jesus. But the Christian view is that with Jesus, revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Muslim view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets, through Jesus, and through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم).
The Muslim view is that with the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم), revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Christian view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets and through Jesus. But the Christian view is that with Jesus, revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Muslim view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets, through Jesus, and through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم).
The Muslim view is that with the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم), revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Christian view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets and through Jesus. But the Christian view is that with Jesus, revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Muslim view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets, through Jesus, and through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم).
The Muslim view is that with the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم), revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Christian view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets and through Jesus. But the Christian view is that with Jesus, revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
So the question is, can Christians accept that God has spoken to mankind through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم)?
The traditional Muslim view is that God spoke to mankind through the Old Testament prophets, through Jesus, and through the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم).
The Muslim view is that with the Prophet Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم), revelation is complete. There's nothing more to be said.
The Tatar Muslims in the Baltic republics and in Poland, where there are a lot of historic mosques as well, generally were very tolerated by the Catholic populations. So this is a warning against seeing these things as inevitable. The situation is more complex than that.
Contemporary Dialogue
What about the contemporary situation? Present-day dialogue between the three Abrahamic faiths. Well, I mentioned earlier that since 1948 serious conversations between Muslims and Jews have been stalled until there is a final just resolution of the still lamentable situation in the Holy Land, although there are contexts where there is dialogue between Muslims and Jews, and I myself participated in them.
For instance, in Oxford, we meet twice a year at the house of the Bishop of Oxford. He presides, and there are rabbis there, Muslims such as myself, Christian theologians. And one of the most consistent things to come out of these encounters, which go on all day, is that the Muslims and the Jews almost always agree with each other on theological questions. And there are one or two things that we can't agree on, but generally there's remarkable consensus.
And it's the Christians, because of the Trinitarian view of God, that seem to be out on a limb. So I mention this to show that there can be, and there should be, serious conviviality and discussion between Muslims and Jews, but it's not as frequent as it ought to be.
Christian Theological Development
Christian thinkers nowadays have, in large part, outgrown the medieval polemic. In the mid-19th century, the great quasi-Christian Victorian philosopher Carlyle gave a speech in London attended by people like Mrs. Gaskell and John Stuart Mill and the intellectual establishment. And he gave the speech on the subject of the Prophet as Hero. And he showed the Prophet Muhammad as a heroic figure, as an alternative model of human perfection.
Although he had some criticisms to make of the Qur'an, nonetheless, since Carlyle's time, it has not been intellectually respectable in the West really to demonise the founder of Islam, as traditionally was the case. Even in the 20th century, you find some Christian theologians of a reactionary bent, including perhaps the best known of all, Karl Barth. Harking back to the old days, Barth, for instance, once famously remarked that the God of Muhammad is an idol like all other idols.
Nonetheless, this is being left behind, and palpably there has been a revolution. But the key question in dialogue is always the status of the Prophet Muhammad. The Old Testament prophets, Muslims and Christians, can largely agree about them.
Jesus, well, there are some areas of overlap and some areas of legitimate argument. But what about the Prophet Muhammad? And a major question that's being asked among Christians is, is it possible to fit
Muhammad into the divine pattern of salvation without dislodging the centrality of the Christ event, of the crucifixion? How can that work?
Some Christian theologians have very bravely stated that, yes, indeed, Muhammad was a prophet. One of the best known of these is the Edinburgh historian William Montgomery Watt, who has a two-volume biography of the prophet.
He says, for instance, in 1991, there are grounds for holding that God was behind the appearance of Islam in order to bring something better to the people. In other words, Islam came into being not through human planning but by a divine initiative. Particularly significant for Montgomery Watt, because he remains a committed Christian, he's actually an ordained minister in the Church of Scotland.
So this now seems to be possible, although there's been quite a lot of criticism from more conservative figures saying that if you accept Muhammad as a prophet, then surely you have to accept in some way the entailment of what he taught. How can you say he was genuinely inspired by God and then not follow what he taught and was doing?
Watt gets around this by saying that the Quran is only partly from God. Some of it comes from the divine, some of it comes from the prophet's own mind.
Catholic Developments
On the Catholic side things have been more cautious but more systematic as perhaps one would expect. One of the entailments of the Second Vatican Council was a radical revision of the traditional exclusiveness taught by the Catholic Church. Extra ecclesia nulla salis, outside the church, no salvation. This is no longer accepted and a papal encyclical called Nostra Aetate which came in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council said explicitly that Muslims like Christians can hope for salvation.
A very major revolution which given the hierarchical nature of the Vatican has managed to trickle down to parish level.
Muslim Perspective
What about the Muslim side? Well in a sense Islam has less to amend here because the traditional polemic against Christianity and Islam was less sharp than the Christian polemic against Islam. Islam has not reciprocated Christianity's attacks on its founder.
It can't because Jesus is so highly esteemed in the Quran. Islam has been less historically inclined to persecute other faiths. So medieval Muslim cities like Cairo or Damascus or Cordoba were full not just of Muslims but also of flourishing Christian communities and Jewish communities.
Whereas in medieval Christian cities it was pretty difficult to exist safely as a Jew to exist as a Muslim or anything else was formally impossible. We find for instance that when the first Ottoman embassy came to
Britain in the rule of Henry VIII they were forced to submit to baptism before they were allowed ashore at Portsmouth. It was just inconceivable that there could be any Muslims in England.
Christian-Muslim Relations Under Muslim Rule
There's another point here which is that historically Christianity has wished to dissociate itself from earthly politics. Islam famously involves itself in earthly politics. What are the implications of this for dialogue? Can there be a common ground?
There are a number of Muslim thinkers most recently somebody called Shabir Akhtar who's a British Asian Muslim who have proposed perhaps ironically or whimsically that the Muslim conquests of the Christian world were actually a blessing for Christianity.
Why does he say this? Well he said in the Byzantine Empire the various Christian minorities were always fighting each other and being persecuted by the states. As soon as the Muslims arrived on the scene that persecution ended so they should have welcomed the thing and that the most appropriate rulers for traditional Christians are in fact Muslims.
Mount Athos Example
And it's true that we find that the monasteries immediately are no longer centres of political intrigue as they had been under the Byzantines and could get on with their more important purpose of nurturing human souls in imitation of Christ.
A good example of this perhaps the most visually spectacular manifestation of Christian monastic piety is Mount Athos which is a promontory off the north coast of Greece. And this superb summit of Eastern Christian spirituality which produced such spiritual movements within orthodoxy as the Hesychast movement has about 20 monasteries still very much flourishing.
Under Byzantine rule the abbots were constantly complaining that they were being drawn into factional infighting in the various imperial disputes in Constantinople. Different monasteries supporting different contenders for the throne. In the 14th century it was ravaged. Many of the monasteries were actually burnt by Catalan mercenaries who'd been brought in by one of the claimants to the throne.
When the Ottoman Turks, the Muslims, arrived in 1420 and captured the holy mountain immediately it found peace and it became the non-political backwater it had always tried to be. New monasteries were constructed under Muslim rule. The art of icon painting was resuscitated.
Sultan Selim I in fact generously re-endowed one of the monasteries and if you go to the monastery of St. Panteleimon today in Mount Athos you'll see the interesting spectacle of Greek monks actually offering up prayers for the soul of Sultan Selim for having done this. So for five centuries of Muslim rule
the holy mountain lived in peace. Until 1912 when the Greek army finally overrun it and the Ottomans left.
Central Issues in Dialogue
Understanding of God
I've already talked about the problem that is really an internal Christian subject for Christian reflection on the status to be attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. But the other things that invariably come up in these encounters relate to the understanding of God. Islam and Judaism see themselves as upholders of the purely monotheistic Abrahamic conception.
Mainstream Christianity has upheld a Trinitarian model of God which nonetheless holds to be an essentially monotheistic conception. How have the Muslims understood this? Well, there are going to be a number of difficulties which beset any attempt by Muslims to define the Trinity. Muslims, hopefully with goodwill, should attempt to see the Trinity as an expression, a way of understanding the divine unity.
But how can they do this? And one of the problems is that there are different Christian understandings of the Trinity. In fact, one of the key issues, if not the key issue that divided early Christianity was Trinitarian doctrine. Reading the Muslim theologians, one sometimes gets the impression that some of them never got the point about the Trinity fully.
Perhaps they were impatient with it. There's an assumption amongst Muslim believers that ultimate reality has to be ultimately simple and that any attempt to introduce a plurality or multiplicity within the Godhead is so obviously absurd and a compromise with that principle that it doesn't really need to be investigated in detail.
But we also find amongst Muslim writers, even in present times, a quite sharp hostility that Muslims are very impressed by Christian ethics, by the life of Jesus, but they really don't like the Christian understanding of God.
Historical Context
And there are two reasons for this, I think. Firstly, the doctrine of Trinity was the most notorious point at issue between Muslims and Christians. It was freighted with very fierce passions.
For the pre-modern Muslim mind, the Christian world was always associated with aberrant violence. These savages who lived to the north of the Mediterranean, who were always fighting against each other, and when they came to the Muslim world, always brought crusades, Reconquista, and so forth. That was the traditional Muslim stereotype of what Christendom was about.
And the idea was that the objective of all of this was to impose the doctrine of Trinity on the hapless Muslim victims. It's recalled even today amongst Muslims in Russia that when Ivan the Terrible took
Kazan, he told his people that they could only escape the sword by praising with us the most blessed Trinity for generation unto generation. And even today in Bosnia, the salute used by Serb irregulars is that.
That's the salute that you'll see them waving on the top of their tanks, which is the traditional Serbian symbol for the Trinity, which is the old gesture of defiance against Muslims. So a lot of Muslim theologising about Trinity has not been able to be particularly objective. It's always taken place against this very powerful, polemical background of fear and often outright hatred.
Contemporary Theological Developments
New Testament Scholarship
But as a layman, it does seem that a kind of consensus is beginning to emerge amongst serious historians preeminent amongst whom are figures such as Professor Geza Vermes in Oxford who's the expert on the Dead Sea Scrolls in Britain that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed or taught that he was in any sense divine, that he was a second person of a divine trinity.
He was a wandering, charismatic rabbi very much a product of and in harmony with the Galilean tradition of first century Palestinian Judaism. This is what Professor Vermes has said in his book Jesus the Jew, and it's very widely accepted not just by British theologians and New Testament people but also in the States.
You have people like Professor Burton Mack, for instance, at Claremont in California. Professor Geza Vermes, he has several books. One is called The Religion of Jesus the Jew. One is just called Jesus the Jew. It's the third one, I can't remember. He's also the most distinguished translator of the complete Dead Sea Scrolls.
Though Geza Vermes' position is, as I said, that Jesus of Nazareth himself, as historians can make out, simply regarded himself as a prophet in the Jewish tradition but would certainly never have seen himself as being divine. That was something that came into Christian belief subsequently as the result of the infiltration of Hellenic ideas of a human being being God simultaneously which was the idea, for instance, that underpinned the Roman Empire.
The Roman Emperor was also God incarnate and there are various incarnationist sects that were popping up all the time in the first and second century.
Vermes' thesis, which is, as I say, widely shared, was that Jesus, the monotheistic Jew, was eventually swamped or veiled by the influx of Gentile converts and the paradigm for whom is, of course, Paul who took him out of his Jewish context and held him up as some kind of quasi-divine saviour figure so that Jesus himself, if he'd wandered into, say, a great Byzantine basilica and looked up at the mosaic of the Christ Pantocrator over the altar simply wouldn't have recognised himself there.
Christian Responses
What can be the Christian response to these new discoveries, to this new image of Jesus the Jew? Well, there are two basic responses that one can observe. The first is that advocated by the great German theologian Rudolf Bultmann who said that, OK, we know that Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure didn't really see himself as God incarnate, but that doesn't matter because God himself is inspiring the church.
The image of Jesus that was intended to be taken and to inspire the church and subsequent humanity was the image that has been traditionally read into the New Testament. And so, although the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith demonstrably are two different figures, it is the latter that we should be taking seriously as the basis for our Christology.
The other response, of course, is to take the new discoveries seriously and to grasp the nettle and to say that the traditional Christian views about Jesus, the old Christology, was framed on the basis of information that we now know to be flawed. The modern New Testament scholarship, the Qumran discoveries, the Dead Sea Scrolls and so forth, no longer allow us as responsible, objective historians to cling to the views developed by third, fourth century Greek theologians who simply didn't have access to this material.
Post-Trinitarian Christology
Some, such as the British thinker John Hick, have said the old images of God and of the Incarnation have to go. Clearly they are a historical product. Clearly it is illegitimate to project these Greek ideas back into the mouth of the very Jewish Jesus. We can retain Christianity, but we need to see the Trinity as some kind of symbol, poetic metaphor, rather than a realistic description of the divine nature.
And John Hick, other theologians such as Don Cupid and some Americans, to some extent somebody called Paul Knitter has been doing this as well, have been charting a post-Trinitarian Christology, which ties in, of course, with what the Unitarian movement has been saying for some years anyway.
Now, I've talked about this in some detail because I think it is going to determine the tenor of Muslim-Christian relations in the decades to come and the new millennium. And I think it's a very hopeful sign because this great stumbling block between Muslims and Jews on the one hand, Christians on the other, namely the idea of the Incarnation, which Muslims simply can't digest.
God cannot inhere in anything he has created. He is outside the world, transcends the world. If that doctrine is jettisoned, if the Trinity is reformulated and regarded just as a poetic rather than a literal statement, well then there really isn't too much to divide Muslims and Christians and a new era of understanding and dialogue can hopefully unfold.
Gender and Theology
Feminist Critique of Trinity
Often these discussions still proceed in mainstream theological circles without sufficient reference to their entailments for concepts of gender. And partly because of the several female colleagues I now have in Cambridge, I've been forced to acknowledge that many of the historic injustices imposed upon women have had theological and, in Christianity's case, Christological justifications.
In America in particular, there has been a group of very articulate, challenging women theologians, Rosemary Ruther being the best known of them, who have said that it is profoundly alienating to modern women to worship a male God. The Trinity, according to Ruther, and the very considerable following that she now has, is alienating to women in anything like its traditional formulation because it's so male-centred.
And as another American, Mary Daly, has said, if God is male, then the male is God.
This seems to be an entailment, that there is a primacy attaching to the masculine principle in the very nature, the very ground of existence, and this can be used to justify every other inequality that has unfolded in history. The Trinity has not just God the Father, but also God the Son. God has chosen a male vessel for the incarnation.
Islamic Perspective on Divine Gender
What John Hick is saying, what Ruther is saying, is that we need to redefine God so as not to attribute gender to God. And where this ties in interestingly with Muslim theology is that Islam never did that in the first place. One of the differences between the characterizations of God in the Bible and in the Koran is that the Koran does not call God Father.
The divine tenzih, the divine transcendence, a word which we'll be discussing in more detail next week, God as utterly other, transcendent, beyond description, beyond comparison, precludes any attribution of gender to God, really or metaphorically.
Interestingly too, there is a kind of ambivalence about the gender of the divine that you find in some of the Hadith literature and also in the Koran itself. God is described as Allah most frequently, which doesn't really look like a male or a female, none in Arabic, although it's treated grammatically as male because there's no new term.
But there is this frequently occurring word for the divine, Al-Rahman, the all-compassionate or the all-loving. And at the beginning of the Koran, you get these words, Bismillah, Al-Rahman, Al-Rahim, in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful. So this is how God chooses to describe himself right at the beginning of the Koran.
Now, Rahman is interesting because the Prophet himself said that this name has been derived from Rahmah, Ishtuqat min al-Rahmah, and Rahmah is min al-Rahim, and Rahim is the Arabic word for a womb. Al-Rahman is God in the creative aspect. Why did God create the world according to the Muslim mystics? Well, it wasn't because he needed to as such, but because of his compassion.
Muslim mystics say that he looked out upon the possible things that could exist that were crying out to him inarticulately for him to bestow upon them the blessing of existence, and because of his Rahmah, his compassion, he breathed out and the world was born. And this is called the Nafas al-Rahman, the breath of the compassionate God. That's another way of seeing the created world.
Muslim mysticism, the breath of the compassionate God is what the world is. And Rahim has a specifically womb-like connotation. As I said, it's the usual Arabic word for a womb, and so some of the theologians explicitly aver that this is a feminine possibility within the divine.
God's engendering, his maternal bringing into existence of the world. We also find in a number of Hadith the concept of Rahmah sketched out more fully. One of the points that sometimes arises in Muslim-Christian debate is that Christianity is a religion of love. Islam and Judaism are religions of the law. And this stereotype can also be tackled by looking at this term. It's conventionally translated as the compassionate.
However, it's not a very good translation. If we look at the Hadith, we find that something more intimate, more warm, more loving, more maternal is definitely implied. A famous Hadith describes how when the Prophet finally conquered Mecca and there was a scene of absolute confusion, people running everywhere, fearing a massacre, which of course didn't occur.
He and his companions spotted a young woman who was running around crying, my child, my child, because she'd lost her baby in the crush. And then she found the child and picked it up and hugged it to her breast. And the companions of the Prophet were so delighted to see this beautiful scene that some of them even wept with joy.
And the Prophet looked at them and he was overjoyed to see their joy and he said, are you amazed at this woman's rahma, her compassion for her son? I swear to you, by him in whose hands lies my soul, God shall show more rahma to his believing servant on the day of judgment than this woman shows to her son.
So again we find a kind of feminine possibility here. And again we find that rahma is not legitimately translated or sufficiently translated just as compassion. It has the sense of personal love as well. And you won't read the Quran fully or correctly unless you recognize that this mistranslation needs to be corrected.
There are other points that could be made in response to that particular point, such as there is a divine name Al-Wadud, which is correctly translated as the loving or the loving kind. It's one of God's 99 names that I'll be talking about a bit more next week. So to say that Islam is not a religion of love or Islam does not have the idea of a loving God simply is not the case. God created existence precisely as an expression of his unconditional love.
Conclusion
Perhaps it's appropriate to conclude by summarizing my own personal view on this. I myself think that it is time for the religions to grow up and to transcend the old disreputable record that they have all acquired of sniping, of polemic, of mutual demonization. The great Catholic theologian Hans Kuhn has pointed out that there can be no world peace without peace between the religions and I think there will only be peace between the religions when we recognize that we are no longer each other's enemies.
Christianity is not a major threat to Islam, Islam is not a major threat to Christianity and so forth. The real threat that equally threatens all of the world's religions is the common spirit of negation, selfishness, materialism. That is what is really endangering religious faith in today's world and once this realization has been made and we have the maturity to acknowledge that we are no longer each other's enemies, when we recognize that we have our backs up against the same wall, then we will be able to use what we have in common, which is quite considerable as a basis for creating a common front against the spirit of greed and negation which is causing so much suffering in today's world.
And it's my hope and my prayer that all of us here will have the generosity of spirit and the vision to make this very important project a reality.