Q. From what I understand, Muhammed was taken up to Heaven in a fiery chariot, according to the Islamist religion. We hold the same belief about the Prophet Elijah. What are we to believe? — R.B.K., via e-mail.
A. We can certainly believe what the Bible tells us about Elijah’s journey to Heaven, but we doubt very much if there is any truth to such a claim for Muhammed. Elijah was a holy man and a type of Jesus. Both men multiplied food, both were rejected by their people, both were threatened with death, and both were taken up into Heaven at the end of their lives. There is much that we can learn from Elijah: his faithfulness and perseverance in carrying out the Lord’s wishes, even at the risk of his life, and his intimacy with God, as demonstrated by God coming to him on a mountainside in a gentle breeze (cf. 1 Kings 19:12).
There are no such signs of holiness in the life of Muhammed, as illustrated in Robert Spencer’s book The Truth About Muhammad and in William Kilpatrick’s book Christianity, Islam and Atheism. In the latter volume, Kilpatrick said that “Muhammad’s role in the lives of Muslims is similar to Christ’s in the lives of Christians” in that followers of both are expected to model their conduct after their founder.
“The trouble is,” he said, “there’s a wide divergence between the life of Christ and the life of Muhammad. How divergent?
“Well, here’s a quick quiz: Which of the two had eleven wives? Which one married a nine-year-old girl? Which one married his ex-daughter-in-law? Which one struck off the heads of captives ‘as they were brought out to him in batches’? Which one ordered his men to gouge out the eyes of a group of captured thieves and to ‘cut off their hands and legs’? One doesn’t need a degree in comparative religion to know that the man in question is not Christ. Critics of Christianity may talk about a moral equivalence between Islam and Christianity, but there is no comparison between the founder of the one faith and the founder of the other” (pp. 142-143).
Q. In past columns, you have quoted the Catechism of the Catholic Church as saying that Muslims “profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one, merciful God” (n. 841). But in considering all that has happened since 9/11/01, for example, over 27,500 terrorist attacks worldwide and a large-scale persecution of Christians in the Middle East, it has awakened my interest in the statement provided by the Catechism.
I am reminded of Christ’s admonition (Matt. 12:25-30) that a kingdom divided against itself cannot stand. How then can three faiths be praying to and worshiping the same God if one of the three is in mortal conflict with the other two regarding such differences as the basic understanding of who God is?
Therefore, is it possible that this is another example of the Catechism reordering traditional Church teaching, in this case regarding Islam? In looking at the origins of Islam and its history, I wondered if the Church has always taught that Islam prays to and worships the same God of Abraham as do Christians and Jews? In my research, I noted many Popes and saints of the Church have not traditionally taught that Muslims, Jews, and Christians adore the one, merciful God. Rather, many have even called Islam a false religion.
It seems to me that paragraph 841 of the Catechism, which is based on Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium and Nostra Aetate, may not necessarily be based on long-held Church teaching. Has the Church always taught that Jews, Christians, and Muslims, all worship the same God? — D.M., Virginia.
A. Such generalities, while true, are problematic because they gloss over the reality of the huge abyss between Islam and Christianity. In his book Crossing the Threshold of Hope, St. John Paul II offered a more realistic picture of Islam:
“Whoever knows the Old and New Testaments, and then reads the Koran, clearly sees the process by which it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the movement away from what God said about himself, first in the Old Testament through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through his Son. In Islam, all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside.
“Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of the Koran, but he is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us. Islam is not a religion of redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad. There is also mention of Mary, his Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption is completely absent. For this reason, not only the theology but also the anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity” (p. 89 of large-print edition).
Furthermore, the broad generalities conceal the brutal nature of Islam, which is bent on the destruction of Christianity. In the book Christianity, Islam and Atheism that was cited in the previous reply, William Kilpatrick quoted the following Muslim “prayer” issuing from a loudspeaker in Mecca in 2011 (cf. p. 105):
“O Allah, vanquish the unjust Christians and the criminal Jews, the unjust traitors; strike them with your wrath; make their lives hostage to misery; drape them with endless despair, unrelenting pain, and unremitting ailment; fill their lives with sorrow and pain and end their lives in humiliation and oppression; inflict your tortures and punishments upon the unjust Christians and criminal Jews. This is our supplication, Allah, grant us our request!”
Not much common ground there, or in those predominantly Muslim regions of the world where, as Kilpatrick has pointed out, Christians “now live in a nightmare world of beatings, abductions, rape, imprisonment, torture, looting of shops, and burning of churches” (p. vii). But how much protest have you heard about this violent campaign against Christians? Let there be one innocuous cartoon about Muhammad, however, and there are riots, followed by groveling apologies by opinion makers in the West.
Islam means “submission,” not peace, and “jihad” means the struggle against unbelievers and a religious holy war against “infidels,” i.e., non-Muslims. But, said Kilpatrick, “the media largely refuse to report stories damaging to Islam; presidents and prime ministers praise it as a religion of peace, and in many parts of the Western world, new laws are being proposed that would make criticism of Islam a crime” (p. 39).
It is suicidal to refuse to look at the differences between Christianity and Islam when the latter is promising to bury the former. Speaking to a Muslim audience in California in 1998, Omar Ahmad, the co-founder of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), said that “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but is to become dominant. The Koran should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion” (cf. Kilpatrick, p. 32). Many European countries are now experiencing the truth of these words.
Another misunderstanding is abetted by those who quote the passage in the Koran (5:32) where Muhammad says that those who kill a human being, “except as punishment for murder or other villainy in the land, shall be regarded as having killed all mankind,” but ignore the passage that follows (5:33):
“Those that make war against God and His Apostle and spread disorder in the land shall be slain or crucified or have their hands and feet cut off on alternate sides, or be banished from the land.” That seventh-century declaration is being implemented right now with the murders of literally millions of Christians (many by crucifixion) since 1975 by Muslims in Africa and Asia.
Islam is not simply a religion, it is a political ideology with religious aspects. Like the Communists in the last century, it has its own particular meaning for such words as “peace,” “justice,” “freedom,” and “equality.”
Unfortunately, in their lexicon these nice-sounding words refer to that period when all the world is dominated by Islam. Nostra Aetate acknowledged the “many quarrels and hostilities” between Christians and Muslims over the centuries, but recommended that we “forget the past and…strive sincerely for mutual understanding” (n. 3). But you won’t find the aggressive forces of Islam expressing such wishful thinking.
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