Please Help Us Keep These Thousands of Blog Posts Growing and Free for All
$5.00
DANIEL JANOSIK : Director of Islamic Studies, Adjunct Professor of Apologetics, Historical Theology, and Islamic Studies at Southern Evangelical Seminary, and the adjunct professor in Apologetics at CIU Columbia International University (A.B., College of William and Mary; M.Div., Columbia International University; M.A., Columbia International University; Ph.D., London School of Theology) Dissertation: John of Damascus, First Apologist to the Muslims.
After a religion is introduced to a culture or to an empire, often a period of theological debates will follow, fine-tuning the details and implications of general religious tenets. Certainly, this was the case during the decades following Muhammad’s death and the establishment of Islam as a political force. Both secular and theological changes rapidly followed the days of desert warfare and initial conversions, as has been demonstrated in the previous chapter. However, within the context of the new Islamic centers of power in the Middle East, more subtle debates and deeper study of the religion quickly sprang up among certain learned groups of the population. This chapter focuses on three of the most important theological debates among Muslim factions in the early days of the Islamic world (mostly in Persia during the Abbasid empire in the 800 and 900’s AD). What did the debates mean to the people participating in them, and what do they mean to Muslims today? The chapter then examines several views by non-Muslim scholars about the long-term impact of these debates and concludes with implications and apologetic conclusions that can be drawn from this fascinating time of theological controversy.
Factual Overview of the Three Theological Debates in Early Islam[1]
As the new religion developed there were adjustments that needed to be made since the new beliefs confronted the traditional religious views of the area. Although there is disagreement about what the debates signify, the basic facts of the arguments are well documented by both non-Muslim and Muslim sources. The first debate occurred between 661 and 700 AD and centered on the role of works versus faith in the practice of religion. One side, called the Kharijites, argued that sin invalidates faith, and people are saved by what they do. Thus, unrepentant sinners were no longer considered true Muslims and were believed to go to hell. The other side, known as the Murji’ites, refused to judge other people’s actions (especially those of leaders) because they believed that only Allah can judge a person’s heart. They also maintained that sinners were still true Muslims and part of the mosque, rather than being infidels and apostates. Interestingly, a third view, proposed by Abu Hanifah[2] and known as the “compromise,” also circulated an argument that works must follow faith. Ultimately this third view was accepted, as it appealed to both sides and thus captured a broad swath of support.
The second debate began very shortly after the first one had concluded and continued for a long time (700-870 AD). This concerned the issue of predestination versus free will. One group, known as the Mu’tazilites, believed that everybody has been given power by Allah to make choices regarding how to live (the doctrine of free will). As a result, this group believed that all are responsible for their own eternal destiny, as each person has the right to embrace or reject salvation in Allah. The traditionalists who opposed this view argued that this doctrine limits Allah because all things are predestined by him, including the actions of individuals. The latter side won this debate in the end because most people agreed that Allah would not have true control if he allowed people to act as they desired. If Allah can do anything, they reasoned, he could not be disobeyed or rejected.
The third debate began in the 8th-century but has actually never been fully resolved. This debate is over the nature of the Qur’an itself. Traditionalist Muslim scholars argue that its words are so perfectly given by Allah that those words themselves are essentially an attribute of Allah. They are, in other words, infallible, eternal, and uncreated. In fact, during the mid-800’s AD under the caliph al-Ma’mum, the Qur’an almost became an object of worship due to this portrayal. The Mu’tazilites, who disagreed with this view, argued instead that the Qur’an is a created object and therefore cannot be an attribute of Allah. It may be from him, but this does not make it equal to him or represent his eternal will. The entirety of this debate flowed out of the 2nd debate about free will versus predestination. Since reason supported the side of a Qur’an passed down from men, the Mu’tazilite position was weakened when the non-reason group (who argued for predestination and no free agency) won the second debate in the 9th century. Thus, the “eternal word of Allah” defeated the Mu’tazilites, who posited a more representational or created view of the Qur’an, but many of the finer points of the argument were never actually answered. This “winning” view is therefore accepted on the basis of faith and not of logical persuasion.
Modern Muslim View of the Debates
How then do Muslims today interpret these theological conflicts? They view them as belonging to a time when the core of Islamic theology, established by the Qur’an and Hadith, began to be eroded by continuous questioning of Islam’s tenets. In the 12th century, one of the most famous philosophers of that period, al-Ghazali, rejected the adequacy of human reason to comprehend God because of its inadequacy to understand the will of Allah. Only by placing unquestioning faith and blind obedience over and above reason, he claimed, could one really achieve such an understanding.[3] Muslims now believe that al-Ghazali’s brave stand helped to resolve the disputes, which in turn allowed Muslims from then on to freely follow the will of Allah in full obedience and unimpeded by heretical notions. According to many Muslims, the debates took place at a time in which philosophers like al-Ghazali fortuitously eradicated external and false ideas about the nature of faith and Allah himself so that Muslims could return to a pure faith, as it was first preached by Muhammad. This, of course, is a retrospective judgment on the events of many centuries ago, and mostly came into being during the 11th and 12th centuries but has continued to be the explanation that most Muslims accept today.[4]
Modern Counterview of the Theological Debates
Critics of this retrospective Muslim view see the debates not as a dangerous toying with heresy but as a natural reaction to inherent problems in Islam itself. These exist because of a core instability that could be identified in Islam from its earliest days. Scholars who press this point argue that Islam began as a political religion, created to be beneficial to effective government but not necessarily to be a perfectly thought-out religion. A large body of revisionist literature, therefore, presses the point that Muslim understandings or explanations of doctrine developed out of political needs rather than theological ones.[5] Some of the issues in the debates may have had their origins in objections from Jews and Christians regarding the Islamic doctrines, but these issues overall were problematic because they were internal flaws in not only Islamic theology but also the monotheism and the sectarian Jewish-Christian beliefs that had existed long before. In the past, logical implications about the finer theological details had never been politically or socially important enough to be closely considered. However, current revisionist scholars see the pressures of the empire and the need to centralize Islam as a national religion under Abd al-Malik as bringing a new level of urgency to the need to resolve these internal weaknesses. Ultimately, Muslim scholars addressing these three theological disputes were unable to resolve the inherent flaws that were foundational in the early years of the religion. Revisionist scholars conclude that this failure was due to the fact that they began with a distorted view or premise of how God works in this world. Thus, not only was their theology flawed, but their ability to deal with those flaws was similarly inadequate.
Implications
Islam is different today than it was in the 9th to 12th centuries. Among modern Muslims general distrust of reason and a resolve to focus on faith and the Qur’an instead have resulted from these three theological debates. One specific outcome of these debates today is that many Muslims believe in predestination to the point that fatalism is prevalent (especially in folk Islam), with a sense of futility and resignation about life. Additionally, as a result of the second debate regarding the nature of the Qur’an, Muslims hold fast to the idea that it is the very word of Allah. Because of this, they believe that they open themselves up to possible disbelief when anything challenges the historicity of parts of the Qur’an. Even a minor discrepancy would challenge their entire view of the Qur’an. These debates, therefore, represent to Muslims a time of dangerous questioning. However, to critics and revisionist scholars, the debates instead recall a lost opportunity to see the inherent flaws of Muslim theology and use reason to deal with them.
The consequences of these foundational flaws are arguably profound. This is because the emphasis on right practice (Orthopraxy) over right doctrine (Orthodoxy) and intuition over reason tends to lead Muslims to a dead end theologically. Subsequently, this provides not only personal but also cultural implications. For example, in The Closing of the Muslim Mind, Robert Reilly concludes that the root of the modern day crisis in Islam – which he defines as the inability to engage with the modern world while staying true to Islam – all stems from the rejection of reason and its eventual result of “intellectual suicide.”[6] Interestingly, he emphasizes that this rejection was not encouraged by the Qur’an itself but by the development of early Islamic theology.[7] He explains:
The closure of the Muslim mind … is the key to unlocking such puzzles as why the Arab world stands near the bottom of every measure of human development; why scientific inquiry is nearly moribund in the Islamic world; why Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand years; why some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon; and why some Muslim media present natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina as God’s direct retribution. Without understanding this story, we cannot grasp what is taking place in the Islamic world today, or the potential paths to recovery – paths many Muslims are pointing to with their rejection of the idea of God that produced this crisis in the first place.[8]
However, there is a deeper consequence that Christians need to be prepared to confront. The “fatal disconnect” in Islamic theology between reason and faith may lead to the belief that nothing can be known for certain, and ultimately to a denial of reality. In that case, as al-Ghazali concluded, “blind obedience” becomes the only valid test of true faith.[9] It is for this reason that Robert Reilly warns that the closing of the Muslim mind has resulted in intellectual suicide and has created the modern Islamist crisis. Reilly concludes, “The closing of the Muslim mind is the direct if somewhat distant antecedent of today’s radical Islamist ideology, and this ideology cannot be understood without divining its roots in that closing.”[10] Thus, in order to understand the root of Islamism in today’s world, it must be realized that the closing of the Muslim mind, which led to modern radical Islamist theology, began when beliefs were divorced from reason. Unfortunately, this rejection of reason often results in irrational behavior where power is used in order to resolve disputes, and this removes the basis on which opposing parties can “reason together.”
Furthermore, on a theological basis, the Islamists view God as pure will and power rather than reason and justice. This conception of God tends to remove all theological barriers to the endorsement of violence in the spread of faith. This may be why violence has been the primary way that Islam spread historically. During an interview, Robert Reilly stated that “Benedict XVI made this point in his Regensburg talk – that not only is violence in spreading faith unreasonable, but that a conception of God without reason leads to this very violence.” Reilly then explained, “Once the primacy of force is posited, terrorism becomes the next logical step to power, as it did in Nazism and Marxism-Leninism.” Reilly then went on to relate how Osama bin Laden fit this same profile when he stated in a video pertaining to the 9/11 attack that “terrorism is an obligation in Allah’s religion.” Reilly’s response to this is that “this can only be true—that violence in spreading faith is an obligation—if God is without reason and therefore acting unreasonably is not against his nature.”[11]
Ultimately, then, the development of Islam was permanently affected by the outcomes of these three debates. Revisionist scholars believe that after some initial success during the 9th and 10th centuries on the part of those who advocated for reason and faith, the Islamic understanding of the nature of God prevented a realistic theology from developing. They feel, therefore, that Muslim thinkers were then, and continue now, to be doomed to accept the ultimate fatalism that a god of pure will dictates.[12] In addition, Muslims who attempt to think through these issues via this worldview must struggle with a consequent deep distrust of anything that has to do with reason or any theology that puts reason above the Qur’an.
Apologetic Conclusions
As these implications indicate, from the time of al-Ghazali to the present, any theology or philosophy in Islam that raised reason above the Qur’an was ultimately rejected. There are, of course, consequences for this practice. This is why Reilly raises the question, “If one’s theological assumptions about reality are incorrect, can one recover from them if these assumptions have been dogmatized and made pillars of one’s faith?”[13] While it would never be appropriate to bring up these issues to degrade or ridicule Muslims about their beliefs, it is important for the Christian apologist to explain how Christianity is different and that reason and faith can both be used in order to develop a theological understanding of God and his creation.
The three theological struggles during the early centuries of Islam demonstrated that some Muslims were seeking to reconcile several core doctrinal issues with Islamic practices dominated by political factions. However, since Islam stresses orthopraxy (right practice), there is an emphasis on obedience to the will of Allah rather than on doctrine. This emphasis tends to lead Muslims to a dead end theologically, or at least to a place where they will no longer question beliefs but will emphasize actions instead.
Christianity, on the other hand, emphasizes orthodoxy (right doctrine). Right doctrine encourages Christian believers to think and use reason to “think God’s thoughts after him.” This emphasis on linking reason and faith allows Christians to successfully adjust to a changing world. It is important for the reader to understand these theological struggles because when we understand the outcome of these debates, we will be able to better grasp why the Islamic world is struggling with reality today.
A good example of how the different emphases result in different outcomes can be seen in the way that Muslims and Christians view God and power. Since Allah is considered to be totally “other,” most Muslims do not believe that they can have a personal relationship with the God of the universe, so the role of mankind is to follow the will of God through blind obedience. This stress on right practice, however, can easily lead to an external faith that only measures devotion through actions. When this motivation is linked to the view that God is a god of power, exerting the will of God over others becomes the dominant goal.
On the other hand, Christians believe that they can have a personal relationship with the God of the universe, who proclaims himself to be the God of Love. Thus, according to this worldview, the role of man is to seek to know God personally and follow his commands freely because God is seen as good and desirous of our wellbeing. This means Christianity emphasizes that God’s power is displayed through his love and not his will. This results in the possibility that God’s love for man could even manifest itself in the incarnation, death and resurrection of the Son of God for our sakes. This could never happen with the God of Islam. Thus, Christians need to understand the theological differences between Islam and Christianity so that they will be able to explain how the different concepts of the nature of God determine not only the way that people will respond to God and understand his relationship with them, but also how they will treat others.
Building Bridges to Understand
In building a bridge to connect with Muslim friends, it would be helpful for Christians to use one of the doctrinal areas in order to demonstrate that there is great freedom in Christ and that Christians are encouraged to use their rational minds to explore the nature of God and of their faith.
There are three significant areas of conversation that can be discussed in regard to the theological development of Islam: a comparison of the Christian and Muslim understandings of the basis for salvation, the role of faith in understanding God, and the personal actions and responsibilities of believers to spread their faith. The relationship between reason and faith is a dominant theme in all three of these topics. Therefore, a good bridge in conversation would be to use specific verses to demonstrate how reason can free us from the bondage of blindly following certain interpretations that may be harmful. This practice would also allow us to explore the reasons for the faith that we have. Each of these three topics can be beneficially discussed using verses from both the Qur’an and the Bible to carefully compare the contrasting theologies and draw helpful conclusions about the implications of both Christianity and Islam.
The topic of free will versus the predetermined world of Islam is a key discussion to bring up since it concerns how a believer views his or her personal actions in relation to a sovereign deity. Muslims generally believe Allah has given humans free will, but that the outcomes of all human actions are governed by the will of Allah. If Allah does not will for something to take place, it will not happen, and if he wills for something to happen, then it will occur no matter what is done to stop it. This can be seen in Surah 9:51: “Say, ‘Only what God has decreed will happen to us. He is our Master: let the believers put their trust in God.’” As a result of the historic debates, this type of teaching is now interpreted with an aspect of fatalism. While it still brings comfort to Muslim readers that they can trust that Allah is in control of events, it can also cause these readers to simply be resigned to fate, since the teaching now states that nothing they do can make a difference to their lives.
This strong view against any level of human free will can be contrasted with the Christian teachings of God’s will and man’s will. Ephesians 1:4 speaks of God choosing his people for redemption, but this is balanced with the free choice of the individual to follow or not follow God in daily life. This lends a greater aspect of freedom in one’s personal actions. As Galatians 5:13 explains, “You were called to freedom, brothers. Only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love serve one another.” I Corinthians 6:12 also points to this balance: “All things are lawful for me, but not all things are helpful. All things are lawful for me, but I will not be enslaved by anything.” Thus, in Christianity, there is a balance between God’s will (which is sovereign and cannot be ultimately thwarted) and the daily choices of humans, made out of their free will. Because Christians are in Christ, they are given free will so that they can choose to follow Christ daily out of love rather than simply obedience or fear. It also demonstrates that God loves us and dignifies our choices, even if we rebel against him. He will not force us to do something against our will. This brings assurance as well as hope.
Works versus faith as the basis of salvation, which was the subject of the first Islamic theological debate, is also understood very differently by Muslims and Christians. Every known religion in the world has one of two methods for finding favor in the eyes of the deity: good works that earn merit, or a free gift of grace (unmerited favor) from the deity to the human. Islam holds more of the former belief while Christianity holds only the latter. Surah 5:9 explains, “To those who believe and do deeds of righteousness hath Allah promised forgiveness and a great reward.” This highlights well the combination of Allah’s grace and the believer’s works, which together save the Muslim from punishment in hell and reward him or her with divine favor. In fact, technically a Muslim’s good works must outweigh his evil deeds to earn him entrance to heaven, but Allah can will the Muslim’s entrance despite a negative balance if he, Allah, so wills it. This makes salvation ultimately more of a reward than the free gift the Bible teaches that it is. Ephesians 2:8-9 is a good verse to help explain this concept: “For by grace through faith you have been saved, not by works, so that no one can boast.” Christians, therefore, believe that works flow out of a true believer in gratitude and obedience to God, but that those works cannot lend even the slightest benefit to their actual salvation since that is the free gift of God alone and is 100% reliant on him. Such a contrasting view of salvation can give a Christian the opportunity to point out God’s gracious love and mercy.
Finally, while the closing of the Muslim mind has made it more difficult to use a reasoned approach to the gospel when reaching out to Muslims, discussing the theological debates of Islam can still lead to a good opportunity to explore the differences between what Islam and Christianity teach about using reason to understand God. This is also an important point for prayer since an opening of the Muslim mind is needed in order for more Muslims to respond to the reasonable evidence for the God of Christianity and the truth about Jesus Christ.
In discussing the theological debates, the Christian must bear in mind that in Islam, since the second and third theological debates established such a strong precedent of not using reason to decide theological points, the emphasis instead is on the nature of Allah being pure Will. This has created the tendency for a strong disconnect between reason and faith in Muslims’ lives. Such a gulf helps to strengthen the fatalism discussed above, and can even lead to a denial of reality. Muslims may, therefore, deny the generally accepted cause and effect relationship in the world and claim instead that all things happen only due to the direct intervention of Allah.
Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that God is a reasonable creator who set all things in motion but allows the natural laws of the world to determine basic cause-and-effect outcomes in daily life. This view promotes an understanding among Christians about the need for men and women to exercise wisdom and discipline in their lives, fostering a sense of both responsibility and hope that one’s actions can truly make a difference in the world. This difference in our understanding of God’s nature, pure Will versus a loving creator who uses reason and logic in the very fabric of the universe, should be highlighted by Christians in conversations with Muslim friends. This is perhaps most important in sharing with them the Christian belief that one must choose to follow Christ, and that there is a balance between faith and reason as well as between God’s will and the free will of an individual. Reasonable faith is a difficult goal to achieve, but it avoids the dangers of both reason without faith (the Western secular fallacy) and faith without reason (the Islamic fallacy). Some verses that can be used to discuss the concept of employing reason to explore and defend faith, as well as to better understand God’s nature, are: I Peter 3:15; 2 Corinthians 10:5; Colossians 2:8; Colossians 4:5-6; Titus 1:9; and Jude 1:3.
In all of these discussions, it is important to keep in mind the method by which Islam and Christianity have traditionally been spread. While the Qur’an urges military conquest and emphasizes dominating the world (see Q. 2:193, 9:33), the Great Commission given by Jesus in the gospels (see Matt. 28:19-20) instead focuses on making disciples. This was ultimately achieved through poverty, suffering, and loving others, not military or even political means. Christian evangelism has also traditionally placed a strong emphasis on using reason to both understand and share faith. Early missionaries in the book of Acts can be seen most often appealing to men’s reason and understanding of the scriptures before conversion, and once converts did profess faith, these new believers were expected to spend several years learning theology and doctrine before their actual baptism. Although the Crusades may well come up in conversation, the point still remains that Islam has promoted empire-building for nearly 1400 years and has done so from its earliest years. Christianity has not merely a different means of spreading its beliefs but has a different and ultimately non-political goal in spreading them. Keeping these differences in mind while discussing the more technical issues of reason, faith, and works can help steer the conversation along profitable lines while avoiding misunderstandings.
[1] Refer to the Theological Chart at the end of the chapter for a visual representation of these debates.
[2] Imam Abu Hanifah (699-767) was the founder of the Sunni Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence, and the first of the major Islamic jurists.
[3] Al-Ghazali, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, quoted in Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind, 115.
[4] Robert Reilly, The Closing of the Muslim Mind: How Intellectual Suicide Created the Modern Islamist Crisis (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI Books, 2010), 119.
[5] See J.W. Sweetman, Islam and Christian Theology: A Study of the Interpretation of Theological Ideas in the Two Religions, Part I: Volume 1 (Origins Lutterworth Press, London, 1945); A.J. Wensinck, The Muslim Creed: Its Genesis and Historical Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1932); A.S. Tritton, Muslim Theology (Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1947); Duncan MacDonald, Development of Muslim Theology Jurisprudance and constitutional Theory (New York: Charles Scribner, 1903); Harry Wolfson, Philosophy of the Kalām (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976); and Telford Work, Sharpening the Doctrine of God Theology between Orthodox Christianity and Early Islam,” (November 25, 2002), Orthodox Theology Group, American Academy of Religion, Unpublished manuscript, 14. Accessed at http://www.westmont.edu/~work (TelfordWork.net), 6-11-2010.
Leave a Reply