How Does Islam Relate to Christianity and Judaism?
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.
This is the 11th
in a series of interviews about religion that I am conducting for The
Stone. The interviewee for this installment is Sajjad Rizvi,
a professor of Arab and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter and
the author of “Mulla Sadra and the Later Islamic Philosophical
Tradition.”
Gary Gutting:
How do you see Islam in relation to the other major Abrahamic
religions, Christianity and Judaism? Should we think of them as (for
example) rivals, or as complementary developments of monotheism, or as
different cultural expressions of an essentially similar religious
experience?
‘Christianity and Islam share the paradox of being religions that claim to be universal, while retaining particular dogmas and practices that are exclusive to them.’
Sajjad Rizvi:
The very notion of Abrahamic religions is arguably Islamic. The Quran
presents Abraham as an adherent of Islam, but here “Islam” means the
primordial faith that connects humanity to one God and leads in turn to
Judaism, Christianity and then historical Islam as proclaimed by
Muhammad. There are some who view Islam as a faith that supersedes the
two earlier monotheistic religions. But I think it’s more useful to
understand Islam as a religion that is self-conscious about its
relationship to Judaism and Christianity and explicitly takes account of
their scriptures and traditions. Almost all the prophets of the Quran
will be familiar to those who know the Bible, and the Quran explicitly
refers to parables, ideas and stories from the Bible.
The common roots — and inheritances — of the three faiths make it useful for us to think seriously in terms of a Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization and heritage that we all share. The development of philosophy in Islam also shows a common tradition of rationality. Anyone with a basic understanding of the categories of Aristotle’s thought employed by Christian and Jewish thinkers would find many of the arguments of Islamic philosophers and theologians familiar. The great Islamic philosopher Avicenna (10th-11th century) developed a metaphysical notion of God that had a tremendous impact on the Latin west: the idea that God is the necessary being required to explain the existence of every contingent being.
G.G.:
But even given these deep similarities, doesn’t Islam claim that the
other two faiths are, if not entirely false, still not the full truth
that Islam is?
S.R.:
Ultimately, the Islamic reflection on the other two faiths considers
them to be earlier versions and revelations of the same truth even if
the long history from their sacral origins might have diluted their
understanding. The Quran itself engages in a polemic with some of those
communities often precisely because of the exclusive claims that they
made about salvation. The Quran tends to insist upon God’s final
decision (to which we, of course, are not privy) against the
presumptions of theologians. The fundamental distinctions in the
scripture are between monotheistic believers, imperfect monotheists and
others: Jewish and Christian communities were considered often to be in
the second category. Some theologians would consider them to be paler
reflections of their original revelation — and some say that their
scriptures have been corrupted. But we should not lose sight of how the
Islamic tradition itself often refers back to the earlier Jewish and
Christian scriptures and prophets to make sense of the mission of
Muhammad.
G.G.:
What about the fundamental question of salvation — do you go to heaven
or go to hell? Does Islam say — as Christianity often has — that you
can’t be saved if you don’t accept it? Or can, for example, Christians
be saved?
S.R.:
It depends on whom one reads. There’s a whole range of opinions. The
early scriptural traditions (especially in the Quran itself) are quite
clear that success in the afterlife — everlasting life in paradise in
the presence of God — is not exclusive to those who define themselves as
Muslims in the historical sense. Belief in God and the afterlife and
performing good deeds are the only conditions of success. Later
theological traditions have complicated matters, but even then a
tradition developed of considering punishment in hellfire to be not
eternal, so that ultimately everyone will be embraced by God’s mercy.
G.G:
Christianity and Islam are both religions that originated in specific
cultural contexts but have developed into world religions, practiced by
people in a wide variety of cultures. How would you compare or contrast
their development in this regard?
S.R.:
Christianity and Islam share the paradox of being religions that claim
to be universal, while retaining particular dogmas and practices that
are exclusive to them. There were times when pursuit of world empire led
both religions to more universal claims. Their trajectories seem
similar — a small, persecuted faith that acquired an imperial form and
expression that led to its dominance across the world. Here both used
orthodoxy to bolster the authority of the empire, and defined heterodoxy
to deal with political dissent. One of the main differences that has
always struck me concerns how orthodoxy was shaped and implemented. On
the whole the Muslim world did not have the same mechanisms of central
control — councils, creeds and inquisitions — to enforce matters. They
sometimes tried to set up such mechanisms, but always failed. When
people raise the problem of a crisis of authority in the Muslim world,
they forget that this is not just a situation that arose in modernity.
What is interesting, however, is that each of the two faiths has
significant internal divisions on matters of political theology.
G.G.: What about the division we hear so much about in the news, between Shias and Sunnis. Could you say a bit about that?
S.R.:
Shia Islam is a religious tradition in which it is precisely the
presence of the divine through the Imam — the successor to Muhammad in
his bloodline — that provides not only the foundations for authority and
sovereignty in human communities of belief, but also the path to
salvation. The everlasting and indeed ever-revealing countenance of the
divine mentioned in the Quran (28:88, for example) is glossed in the
tradition as the person of the Imam. The Imam is not the defender of the
Law; he is the Law — he is not the exegete of scripture, he is
revelation itself. Through the person of the Imam, the transcendent
divine, the origin and the true King, is manifest; and believers follow
the path to salvation through their devotion and obedience to the Imam.
In fact, from early on, Islam seems to have held that believers’
afterlife depends on their allegiance to their community. In this sense,
Shia is a normative political theology, concerned with the relation of
political authority and salvation. The comparison with Christ
Pantocrator and the person of the emperor in Eastern Orthodox
Christianity is rather striking.
G.G.: How does this compare with the Sunni traditions?
S.R.:
In contrast to the Sunni, the Shia traditions in Islam have a more
absolute notion of the political-theological significance of both sacred
history and the beliefs that one holds and the rituals that one
practices. Shia political theology speaks of a messianic 12th Imam who
will come as a redeemer and avenger in the last days, though this theme
is routinized and deferred. Sunni traditions tend to be more pragmatic
about politics, even though there is a rather atavistic nostalgia about
the caliphate as a paradigmatic institution of early Islam, a nostalgia
for a golden age that never was. It has always been the normativity of
the community and its consensus that is binding which lead to a greater
stress on conformity of practice but also leaves space for condemnation
of views outside of the consensus as heresy.
But what is essential
to remember is that each theological strand and community within Islam
claims the true and proper interpretation and practice of the faith for
themselves. Therefore, discussing the Shia merely as heretics or those
on the margins or outside the “mainstream” community misses the simple
point that they consider themselves to be bearers of the original
message and the real community of believers who define Islam for
themselves and for others.
G.G.:
Many people are puzzled at the violent conflicts between Shias and
Sunnis. They think that Europe has pretty much gotten past this stage
since the Enlightenment, and they wonder why the same thing hasn’t
happened in Muslim countries.
S.R.:
I think we forget that sectarian violence is often forged in the
crucible of political conflicts and uncertainty. While there are
theological accounts that back the discourses of condemnation in the
modern world, the impetus often comes from the scramble for political
and economic resources. The basic stability of Europe in opposition to
what is happening in Syria and Iraq is the differentiating factor — and
even then in times of crisis, as we saw in the former Yugoslavia in the
1990s, sectarian entrepreneurs could be relied upon to manipulate
emotions for political gain. There is, of course, the sense that
religious feelings even within faiths are strongly held – and this is
clear even in Europe and North America. But if one has the rule of law
and political stability, that negativity to the other may manifest
itself in hate speech but rarely in violence.
G.G.:
You’ve presented what many of our readers may see as a quite moderate
and “enlightened” version of Islam. But aren’t you ignoring
fundamentalist versions of the religion that today are very powerful and
directly opposed to liberal values? I’m thinking, for example, of their
treatment of women, their demand for Islamic states, and their use of
violence to achieve religious goals. Do you think there is a need for a
reformed Islam that will decisively reject such fundamentalist views?
S.R.:
In many ways we live in an age of fundamentalisms — and this is true
not just of religious communities. That, coupled with the weakness of
traditional scholarly institutions in many Muslim communities, has led
to uncertainty about who speaks for the faith and whether anyone can
speak definitively for the faith. I have a problem with applying to
Islam the standard European account of progress as a process in which
conflict with secular thought leads to reform, intellectual
enlightenment, and finally the redefinition of faith in terms of beliefs
divorced from any communal expression.
What I would argue for
is not necessarily reform — I have serious reservations about most
reformist agendas as well as forms of “neo-traditionalism”— but rather
for a more open debate about the simple acts of reading texts in
multiple ways. We need to understand how we might read traditional texts
in ways that make sense of our faith for the contexts in which we now
live. This is not radical reform, but it is an attempt to keep the
dialogue within traditions alive and dynamic across space and time. It
is a particular strength of Islam that its intellectual traditions of
philosophical theology and spirituality emphasize such dialogue.
G.G.:
How do you, as a Muslim, respond to the atheistic claim that, in our
age of science, there’s no rational basis for accepting theism?
S.R.:
I reject the atheistic claim, since I don’t believe in a God of gaps
and I don’t think Islamic intellectual traditions pit science against
religion. In those traditions, arguments for the existence of God were
not based on scientific observations, but rather on the simple intuition
that we cannot reduce everything that we can say about ourselves and
about our world to the physical. Atheists may not find arguments for the
existence of God compelling, but the arguments at least allow believers
to fit their faith in God into a rationally coherent framework. This is
why reflection on existence to provide a rational case for believing in
God has been a critical element of most Muslim theological traditions.
Alongside those strong
traditions of rationality, there have also been fideistic tendencies as
well as more experiential responses. What are we to make of the
cultural artifacts of our religious civilizations, of the art, poetry,
music and expressions of the self, rooted in an enchantment with some
ultimate reality that remains intangible and unscientific? The argument
from contingency mentioned above is still one that I think gives a
rational account that is coherent. But I also recognize that we are not
all rational agents who approach our reality in a purely logical way at
all times.
This interview was conducted by email and edited. All interviews from this series can be read here.
Gary Gutting is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French
Philosophy since 1960,” and writes regularly for The Stone.
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