Tag Archives: Islam

Islam and Christianity: A Conversation with James Skillen

Posted on by
9

The Farthest Mosque JerusalemA leading social and political thinker and practitioner, James Skillen is the author and editor of many books and journal articles, and he is president emeritus of the Center for Public Justice. His new book, The Good of Politics: A Biblical, Historical, and Contemporary Introduction, has been aptly cited as “a call to political repentance.” Having known Jim for a long time, I have greatly benefited from his biblical grounding and generosity of spirit on a staggering array of topics. Since retiring from CPJ, he is sharing his wisdom by writing, speaking, and mentoring more than ever. This conversation took place at the Terminal Brewhouse in Chattanooga and afterward via email.

Charles Strohmer: Jim, let’s begin with what you see as some core differences between a Christian and a Muslim view of religion and politics in the context of the spread of Islam and Christianity.

James Skillen: Islam is basically a religion of law and its scholars are scholars of the law, and there is no imperial authority. The chief authority is God, who has directed his word through the Prophet. And the Qur’an, in Arabic, is not debatable. It’s the law. Of course Islam has become very complex because you’ve now got all sorts of different schools of interpretation. But what gives it its identity as a whole is the Qur’an.

Where I think it makes the most sense to understand Islam politically is in its view of history, that the whole world should become the dar al-Islam (the abode of the people of God in obedience to Allah). The indisputable idea is that God is creator and sovereign over all, so the dar al-Islam has to unfold, but not necessarily by force, although the early Islamic conquests in the Arabian peninsula and across north Africa and into Spain were seen as satisfying this progress of the dar al-Islam. And this created the idea of the umma, the unified community of Muslims.

CS: Where do militant groups today, such as ISIS/ISIL and al Qaeda, fit in? They are seeking to spread the dar al-Islam through force and violence.

JS: For some Muslims, the big crisis since the end of World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman empire is the shrinkage of Islam. I just heard it again today on the radio: Why isn’t the umma increasing like it should, where is the progress of the dar al-Islam? So there has arisen a radical fringe element that believes you can take up arms to advance the spread of the dar al-Islam, and people like Osama bin Laden and the leader of ISIS [Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi] have found legitimacy for that militancy in the Qur’an, whether against non-Muslims or even against Muslims, such as those who support democracy and other things of the West.

So there’s this crisis in Islam in which, on the one had, you have those who, like ISIS, want to see rise of a new caliphate that rules the dar al-Islam through sharia law, and on the other hand you have those who have accepted much about the West.

CS: This doesn’t sound unlike the Christian hope for Christianity to spread around the world, for everything to come under the lordship of Christ.

JS: I would say it is very parallel to a Christian view of the kingdom of God that will someday be fulfilled. It can’t be stopped. The gates of hell will not prevail against God’s progress of this. But the Christian community is not called to conquer all nations but to preach the gospel. Christianity itself cannot be brought by force. With Islam, the nations need to come under rule and everybody needs to submit.

I think the parallel that ought to exist in Christianity is to say, and you see this in Isaiah and other biblical prophets, that to come to church regularly but not to live a life of holiness and justice, that’s mocking God. I mean, you can’t have the God who is the sovereign of all just as a Sunday activity. So to bring all things under the lordship of Christ has to be understood as each thing in its God-ordained sphere of activity. So the radical difference from the radical Muslim and the radical Christian, I would say, is that Christians do not see force as their means for bringing in God’s kingdom. God will do that in his own good time.

Wheat and Tares iconCS: Someone once said to me something like: Christianity is a kind of voluntary society and arose as such, but Islam arose as political religion. Would you say that’s an accurate way to describe a radical difference between the two faiths?

JS: I think Christianity is as much a political religion as Islam, but the view of the political is different. In Christianity, Christ is confessed as king and lord of all. All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to him. But the political task of Christians is one of following Christ as disciples, and Christ did not call them to try to clean up this world of all the weeds that fell into the field of good plants (Matthew 13). God will decide when that should be done. In the meantime we are to live as those seeking justice and loving our neighbors in the world that God is upholding in Christ with the same rain and sunshine falling on the just and unjust alike. The Muslim view of human responsibility under God’s law on earth is very different.

CS: This idea about bringing all things under Christ’s lordship within their God-ordained spheres – many university students and graduates are struggling with this. You often call this “sphere sovereignty,” which is quite different than the Islamic view of sovereignty.

JS: I think Abraham Kuyper’s phrase about “sphere sovereignty” places too great an emphasis on the kind of authority the “sovereign” should have. This is understandable in his context, but his main point was that only God is truly sovereign. And he delegates that sovereignty in differentiated measure to the different arenas of human responsibility. No single human authority, whether church or state, can subsume all human responsibilities under its ultimate sovereignty.

The better way for us to think about this today, I think, is for us to emphasize different kinds of responsibility God has given us, most of which exist by the very nature of what God created us to be: friends, spouses, parents and children, gardeners and farmers and shepherds, priests and governors, and so on. What is required is that we learn how to serve God in every sphere of responsibility in accord with what is required of that responsibility.

In our sin we go crooked, backwards, destructively, violently with our responsibilities, such as by dishonoring our friends, rejecting our parent’s responsibility, destroying the earth, and killing each other. In the new life of Christ into which we have been called, the whole of our identity as human beings – the image of God – is called to repentance and to the renewal of all creational responsibilities. And since these responsibilities are diverse, it is a mistake (historically demonstrated) to ask governments to rule families, or to treat a farm like an engineering corporation, or to expect church leaders to tell us how to vote or how to run a business or how to do chemistry.

Jesus healing the blind manCS: What about the secular / sacred split that afflicts Christianity? It has been severely attacked by Muslim intellectuals such as the Egyptian political activist, the late Sayyid Qutb, who taught that the secular / sacred dichotomy is at the root of the world’s ills. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and Osama bin Laden before him, and other radicalized Muslim leaders, are absolutely opposed to the split. And the caliphate that al-Baghdadi is trying to create through ISIS/ISIL seeks to rid the world of it.

JS: Christians should not be accepting any sacred / secular dualism, which in a sense goes back to the Middle Ages, when the Catholic church established a distinction between the religious and the secular. The “secular” didn’t mean “not related to God.” It meant related to God via the Catholic church, the sacraments. Then after Christendom fell apart and the church could no longer command politically with moral authority, the secularists said: Thank goodness we’re getting rid of God and the priests and the hierarchy. We don’t need priests for the things of this world. And so they have what’s before them: a secular world.

All that remains is for that to be radicalized by saying: There is nothing else that exists but this world. There is nothing transcendent that can lead to faith in the radical secularity of this world, in which humans are totally in charge and the idea of God is dispensed with. In Islam generally and in radical Islam as well, there is no recognition of such a secular reality. There is only what God created and God himself, who calls us to rule everything under God. So ISIS would say: We’re not going to get anywhere just by blowing people up. We need a political entity not only to replace the Ottoman empire but to do better than that by establishing a domain, a territory, in which all who live there submit to shari’a in submission to Allah, who will bless this effort and pretty soon the whole world will be submitted to Allah. And the idea of the “secular” will disappear.

What the Christian would say is that there is no secular if what you mean by it is something separated from God and is on its own. Instead, every vocation should be seen as one of the aspects of human dedication to God, in which you love God with all you heart and your neighbor as yourself. And within that framework we would not accept any duality of life. You can and should accept distinctions, such as between churches and states or schools and families, and between this age and the coming age, but this age is not a secular age as compared to the coming age as sacred. It’s all part of God’s one creation.

CS: So where do we go from here? What do you see as a gospel-shaped-wisdom response to Christian – Muslim relations and to U.S. policy toward Muslim majority countries in the Middle East? The problems can seem so overwhelming that one may be forgiven for throwing his or her hands up in despair.

JS: There is no easy answer, because what is really required of Christians is that we show we agree with Muslims in rejecting any acceptance of the “radical secular.” Christians need to show what this means by living it out in every arena of their responsibility as disciples of Christ. In many cases this requires more than churches and Christian publishing companies, more than Christian colleges and some evangelistic organizations on university campuses. It will mean Christians finding appropriate ways to organize themselves in their responsibilities as attorneys, doctors, engineers, bankers, broadcasters, and much more. We have to learn how to quit treating any part of our lives as “secular” and not part of our Christian walk.

At the same time we need to gain a deep understanding of what Muslims believe and how they live in many different countries and settings. And then we must learn to engage them wherever possible in friendship and conversation – where we work, where we study, and where we vote and pay taxes. And in all of that we need to be bold to contend with them about our disagreements as to what the Bible teaches and as to why we ought to live to obey God.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

For interested readers, this site will help you start discovering the wealth of Jim’s wisdom, much of which is being made available on the Web.

Images by Mohammad Usaid Abbasi, Ted, and Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)

ISLAM: IS IT OR IS IT NOT THE PROBLEM?

Posted on by
3

Islam at nightIn the wake of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in Paris that left 12 persons dead, Manuel Valls, the French Prime Minister, declared, “It is a war against terrorism, against jihad, against radical Islam.” President  Hollande, Valls’s boss, was more measured. “Those who committed these terrorist acts, those terrorists, those fanatics, have nothing to do with the Muslim religion,” he said during preparations for the Paris solidarity March.

There is more going on in the two comments than at first meets the eye. It is not just that Hollande’s is more accommodating to Islam. The two French leaders contradicted each other. From 9/11, to the London Underground bombing, to al Qaeda in Yemen and Boka Haram in Nigeria and the beheadings by ISIS in Iraq, two incompatible views about the role of Islam have saturated political views, the world media, and local coffee bars. Islam is the problem. Islam is not the problem. The horrific and well-planned Paris attack has made this serious bone of contention hugely public again, including comments by leaders such as Hollande and Valls.

Broadly speaking, behind the contradictory views lies, on the one hand, the organizing principle of “inclusion” found in multiculturalism, which too often makes excuses for jihadist violence, and, on the other hand, a religious, political, and social fundamentalism, such as is found in strains of American Evangelicalism, which has a complete and uncomplicated identification of Islam as a violent religion. In the former view, Islam is not the problem. In the latter, Islam is the problem.

The real problem, however, is that neither argument fits the facts. At the end of the day, both leak like a sieve. They lazily avoid the hard and time-consuming work of acknowledging and addressing all of the relevant facts. That’s half of my conclusion after more than a decade of work in the areas of Christian – Muslim relations and U.S. – Middle East foreign policy. The other half is this: Although it is wrong to say that Islam is the problem, it certainly is true that Islam has a problem.

Part of my work has entailed extensive research into this problem, and I recently began feeling brave enough to collect my thoughts about it in a formal essay. Besides writing deadlines and related pressing work, however, I hesitated to start the essay because, heart on sleeve, it would not be easy to write, to aptly cover what needs to be said. I also thought that someone wiser ought to tackle this.

And then I breathed a sigh of relief after reading John Azumah’s essay in First Things. Well written, tightly argued, amply illustrated, and covering all the cardinal issues in just a few thousand words, the essay ought to be required reading. Azumah is associate professor of World Christianity and Islam at Columbia Theological Seminary, and his essay, “Challenging Radical Islam, An Explanation of Islam’s Relation to Terrorism and Violence,” brilliantly subverts both the “Islam is the problem” and “Islam is not the problem” arguments.

Another crucial service Azumah performs for us is this. He deconstructs the is / is not arguments in a way that leaves us at the end of the essay taking away a fair, balanced, and clear understanding of the problems that Islam has, and he explains why only Muslims can solve them. Further, he is well aware that when you point a finger, three more point back at you. So I appreciated his humility, which at the end of the essay addresses ways in which we Christians also need reform.

Enough said. Read Azumah’s essay. He’s spared me a lot of work. And as a fellow writer, I can tell you he worked hard on this one.

©2015 by Charles Strohmer

Image permission of flickr.com.

ISIS & THE RISE AND FALL OF ISLAM part 3 of 3

Posted on by
2

fall in black & white (ciro@tokyo)In the previous post we looked at the rise of Islam during its beginning years, in Mecca and Medina, especially the difference in Muhammad’s religious-political methodologies in the two cities. In this post we will look at Sayyid Qutb’s curious interpretation of Islam’s history, especially what he seems to have indicated was the fall of Islam. In the next post we will look at Qutb’s radical solution to that fall and how it influences ISIS and al Qaeda.

The Fall of Islam. According to Sayyid Qutb, the arrival of Islam in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century was God’s solution to “the secular vs. the sacred dichotomy,” (“the hideous schizophrenia”), that had spread throughout the world. Implementing that solution would end the sacred vs. secular dichotomy by making the religion of Islam the rule for all of life, including political life. Qutb wrote in Islam: The Religion of the Future (IRF), that “the secular vs. sacred dichotomy has never been postulated in Islamic history, nor can it ever be.” The problem, however, as Qutb saw it, was that totality of what he often called “true Islam” “true religion,” that is, God’s total rule, was only implemented for a short while before Muslims themselves caught secular vs. sacred virus.

In other words, according to Qutb, after the widespread Muslim conquests during Islam’s first century – in and around the Arabian peninsula across north Africa and into Spain – Islam was able to spread only so far, geographically, because Muslims no longer adhered to the unitary Islamic vision of Muhammad and his companions. Instead, the Muslim community and its leaders, with few historical exceptions, continually fell prey to idolatry. They allowed false gods to rule many aspects their public lives, just as Jews and Christians before them had done, by not complying with what Qutb thought was God’s vision for all of life.

For Qutb, the solution for Muslims was to return to the original unitary vision. And the secret for achieving this lay in following Qutb’s interpretation of the Mecca and Medina period. “For thirteen years after the beginning of his Messengership,” Qutb wrote in Milestones, “[Muhammad] called people to God through preaching, without fighting … and was commanded to restrain himself and to practice patience and forbearance. Then he was commanded to migrate [from Mecca to Medina], and later permission was given to fight.” The is a key tenet to understanding Qutb’s thought as well as that of militant organizations such as al Qaeda and ISIS.

In Muhammad’s journey from religious prophet to political ruler to military conqueror, Qutb saw two essential attitudes or phases. (1) During the Meccan period, Muhammad held his warriors in check under intensive study of the Qur’an only. This was a time when Allah cleansed them inwardly and they received “initial stages of training” from “that one source of guidance” (the Qur’an). (2) Only after having achieved spiritual purity through such cleansing would victory be granted when the warriors went out to conquer and subdue (Milestones, chapter one). Qutb was insistent on this, and it lead him to a third non-negotiable point: Every failure to establish Islam’s totalitarian rule was the result of premature fighting, that is, of military jihad before sanctification.

This interpretation of Islam fit neatly within Qutb’s general view of world history as manifestations of the sacred vs. the secular dichotomy. According to Qutb, Muslim history, for the most part, had picked up the bug, for which the only solution was an injection of Muhammad’s (lost) original vision for implementing God’s totality rule over all of life. And the only way to get that injection was through a return to the purity of what Qutb believed was Islam’s original vision.

But Qutb did not stop with theory. As we saw here, he recognized the connection between theory and practice, ideas and actions, belief and behavior. So he challenged the Muslims of his generation to get with it. Writing voluminously from his prison cell in Egypt during the 1950s and 60s, Qutb called for a new breed of Muslim leadership – a purified, cleansed vanguard that would fight the flood of idolatry and implement “the religion of God,” by which he meant “the Islamic way of life” (IRF). “Only then with the hideous schizophrenia come to an end” (IRF). “The religion of Islam is the Savior” (IRF).

In the next post we will look at the role that “jihad” plays in Qutb’s vanguard movement.   Osama bin Laden, who, like Qutb, had no formal religious training from any Islamic seminary, is the most infamous jihadist pioneer to date. Bin Laden’s revolutionary al Qaeda movement is the most battle-hardened, and ISIS is an offshoot.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Image by ciro@toyko (permission via Creative Commons)

ISIS & THE RISE AND FALL OF ISLAM part 2 of 3

Posted on by
1

Bedouin campIslam arose in the Arabian peninsula in the seventh century, during a time when there was a lot of fragmentation of kingdoms, rise of new kingdoms, and reshuffling of borders taking place in Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa. Sayyid Qutb believed that Muslims followed Islam in its totality early on; that is, they fully implemented God’s sovereign rule over all of life, what he sometimes called God’s unitary message.

But the totality of God’s rule was only in place for several decades, according to Qutb. Muslims, like the earliest ancient Jews, “having seized the leadership of mankind, lost its grip on Islamic principles, and went into decline,” as essayist and critic Paul Berman put it in Terror and Liberalism, commenting on Qutb’s view. So what happened, specifically?

Muhammad, the founder of Islam, was a committed monotheist, and his biggest religious gripe about the countless small bedouin tribes that populated the Arabian peninsula in his day was that they were polytheists. He preached monotheism with some success among them for more than a decade in and around Mecca. Although he was resisted and at times persecuted for it, he nevertheless united some of the tribes under his banner “There is no God by Allah.”

Then in the year 622, with a small band of close followers, he traveled 280 miles north to Medina, a city with an uneasy balance of power between well-established Jewish settlers and more polytheistic Arabs. It had no stable government and was apparently pretty wild and unruly. Muhammad had accepted the city fathers’ invitation to become the go-to arbiter of Medina’s social and political disputes.

Like many politicians and business people throughout history who have little interest in religion except to manipulate it for their own interests, that was apparently the case in Medina. Islam was merely useful to the city fathers, writes Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis in The Arabs in History (TAH), “not so much as a new religion, but as a system that could give them security and discipline (and) satisfied their political and social needs.” “The full religious conversion of the Medinese did not take effect until much later.”

Lewis believes that it was in Medina, not in Mecca, that the fledgling religion of Islam became politicized, marking a turning point for Muhammad and his closest followers, whom Muslim history calls his “companions.” In TAH, Lewis writes:

“In Mecca, Muhammad was a private citizen, in Medina the chief magistrate of a community. In Mecca he had had to limit himself to more or less passive opposition to the existing order, in Medina he governed. In Mecca he preached Islam, in Medina he was able to practise. The change necessarily affected the character, activities and doctrines of Muhammad and of Islam itself.”

During the several years that Muhammad ruled Medina, a series of bloody skirmishes and deceitful dealings between the Meccans and the Medinese culminated in Muhammad’s victorious return to Mecca. The rudimentary political Islam that ruled Medina now extended to Mecca as well, and here and there in the nearby region. This increased the geography of Muhammad’s religious-political rule, as more and more bedouin tribes and city dwellers came under submission to the new religion of “Islam” – which means “submission” in Arabic.

It was during this period that the growing Muslim “tribe” was first referred to as the umma – the community bound together by the religion of Islam. And in TAH, Lewis writes of key changes in the collective thinking of those so united. Importantly, the Islamic “faith replaced blood as the social bond,” and that “change in effect meant suppression … of the blood feud,” which in turn allowed for greater unity within the umma through arbitration. Also, and significantly, there arose a new conception of authority:

“The Sheikh of the Umma, that is, Muhammad himself, functioned … not by a conditional and consensual authority, grudgingly granted by the tribe [the umma] and always revocable, but by an absolute religious prerogative. The source of authority was transferred from public opinion to God, who conferred it on Muhammad as His chosen Apostle. [The umma, then, was a] political organism, a new kind of tribe with Muhammad as its Sheikh, and with Muslims and others as its members. Yet at the same time it had basically a religious meaning. It was a religious community, a theocracy. Political and religious objectives were never really distinct in Muhammad’s mind or in the minds of his contemporaries.”

After Muhammad’s death in 632, Abu Bakr, Muhammad’s father-in-law and a senior companion, became the leader of the umma and was given the title “Deputy” (of Muhammad) – “Caliph” in English. He held executive power and his functions included being the umma’s military leader. With a year of becoming Caliph, Bakr was engaged in a series of successful battles and conquests in and around the Arabian peninsula. And the rest, as they say, is history.

mosque interior domeWithin 100 years, Islamic rule had spread into Southwest Asia, across North Africa, and into Spain. Muslim armies had conquered cities, provinces, lands, and all sorts of Jewish, Christian, Arab, and pagan tribes that were then part of the ruling Byzantine and Persian empires of the Near and Middle East. In the process, the significant question of how to rule such a widespread empire of diverse peoples had been answered by the institution of state rule around the religious caliphate – the central ruling institution of Islam, which had a variety of guises until it was completely abolished in the early twentieth century.

But what concerns us here are those very earlier years and the twist Qutb put on them to account for what we may call the rise and fall of Islam, which we pickup in the next post.

©2014 by Charles Strohmer

Images by jonl1973 & -Reji respectively (permissions via Creative Commons)