Encounter with Islam

"God fight them," wrote Mohammed in the holy Koran. "What liars they are." Mohammed meant Christians and Jews, whom he had expected to accept his new vision. When they did not respond, he took to the sword. Before the onslaught Eastern Christianity declined in numbers, vigor and territory. Within 80 years of Islam's birth, the mosque had replaced the church from Antioch to Carthage.

Christians have always been puzzled by the Moslem conquest, which took Islam to the Pyrenees and beyond them into France. The Cross had emerged triumphant from the blood bath of Roman persecution. Why had it fallen before the Prophet's sword? In The Call of the Minaret (Oxford University Press; $6.25), published last fortnight, Anglican priest and Moslem scholar Kenneth Cragg blames not Moslem power but Christian failure for the rise of Islam. "It was a failure in love, in purity, and in fervor, a failure of the spirit," he argues. "Islam developed in an environment of imperfect Christianity."

Why a New Faith? "Islam was generated as a new faith," says Cragg, "because of the conviction that a new one there must be. But why?" A bitter, running dispute between Christian factions in Arabia scandalized the non-Christian population, and Christian ideas had made no lasting impression on the Arabs among whom Mohammed was,born. "Perhaps in the formative years of Mohammed's quest," says Cragg, "a more virile, a less dubious Christianity could have satisfied his sense of need and obviated the great 'other' that Islam became." Later, Christian assaults in the form of the Crusades taught Islam to hate the faith the Crusaders professed. And long years of Western domination impelled the Moslem nations to identify Christianity with the unfeeling exploitation and hypocrisy of unenlightened colonialism.

Today Christian faces Moslem in a new sort of encounter. From Marrakech to Djakarta, the nations of Islam's teeming household (close to 322 million members) are bursting with newly won freedom and touched with the spirit of change. For the first time, Christian and Moslem face each other on equal ground and with mutual need. It is high time, says Author Cragg, for Christians to re-examine their relationship with the children of the Prophet.

Judas on the Cross? "The objective is not, as the Crusaders believed, the repossession of what Christendom has lost, but the restoration to Moslems of the Christ they have missed ... It aims not to have the map more Christian but Christ more widely known." First task, Author Cragg argues, is to erase the monumental Moslem misunderstandings of Christianity for which the Christian church itself is partly responsible.

Those misunderstandings Cragg traces to the initial fact that Mohammed had no thorough acquaintance with the Bible. He was ignorant of the meaning of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity and the sonship of Christ. To him Christ seemed a rival of the One God, and that Mohammed could not accept. Accordingly he reduced Christ to the status of one prophet among many and gave him a few brief pages in the Koran. Even today Moslems refuse to consider Christianity a monotheistic faith because of this early misreading of Christ. Nor could Mohammed, for whom it was unthinkable that God would let his prophet suffer ignominy and defeat at the hands of his detractors, accept Christ's immolation: crucifixion was no proper fate for a prophet. So Moslem tradition holds that someone, perhaps Judas, took Christ's place on the Cross.

The recent growth of Christian Biblical criticism has not helped allay misunderstanding. Moslem scholars see in it only proof that the Christian scriptures are unreliable. The accounts of the Evangelists are, in the Moslem mind, confirmation that the New Testament does not share the validity of the Koran, which was revealed to Mohammed alone. "The assumption is immediate," says Author Cragg. "that because there are four, none of them is valid."

Baptism Postponed. Another difficulty is the fact that Islam is not only a religious faith but a communal allegiance and a social order. The Moslem's relation to God is inextricably linked with his relation to society. As a consequence, Moslems frequently upbraid Christianity for not disciplining and controlling Western civilization. Christians must impress on Islam, says Cragg, that "the Christian understanding of how man is put to rights is that it happens personally and through faith. . . . Thus the unit of Christianity [is] not society but persons in society . . . The Gospel of grace does not suppose that men are perfectible by law."

Any Christian approach, Cragg believes, is doomed to failure unless it helps "the Moslem world to conceive of the Christian mission not as depredatory but as constructive." Cragg has little faith in approaches based on oil concessions or treaties of mutual assistance. For lasting understanding between Christians and Moslems, the West must "go deeper than interest, prudence or policy into areas of spiritual communication."

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