SOME REFLECTION DURING RAMADAN 2017: Essay One.
By Paul Merkley.
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How the Qur’an Fills the God-Shaped Vacuum.
That tiny minority of Christians who have actually read the Qur’an, in whole or in part, have had to struggle with its re-iterated assertion that it is Mohammad who alone ever understand Jewish and Christian Scripture.
To put it mildly, it seems presumptuous – the worst possible taste – to snatch out of the hands of the Jews the Scripture which came to them about a millennium before Muhammad came into the world, and then, as Muhammad does, to go on pontificating upon the real meaning, disinterred by the Prophet of God from the volumes of Jewish lies – especially so, as Prophet Muhammad was, of course, illiterate.
This remains a strange phenomenon to those of us who have opened the pages of the Qur’an in sincere effort to evaluate its message for ourselves –and come out on the other side.
But the demoralizing truth is that young people who are seeking to escape from everything that their parents belong to are drawn to Islam’s sovereign and triumphant superiority to everyone’s else’s message. Side-by-side with this goes Muhammad’s assurance that nothing can ever be gained by exchange of thought with anything that draws its authority or prestige from outside of the Qur’an.
Every young man in our own midst who has been to University and has put on his mental shelf the wisdom of Sociology 101 knows that he does not belong to anything that he belongs to. This knowledge, taken with fullest seriousness, will close for ever all avenue back to the wisdom that informed Judaeo-Christian civilization. It opens up a God-shaped vacuum in his soul (as St. Augustine explains); thereafter (as G. K. Chesterton explained about fifteen centuries later) it is not the case that he believes nothing, but rather that he begins to believe anything.
These days, the God-shaped vacuum mostly draws into itself everything that is commercially profitable, trashy and ephemeral. And then there is Islam. The spirit that licenses every Muslim to cast at once into outer darkness everything that every Christian theologian and every Jewish sage has ever written has irresistible appeal to every young person who has ever been dragged out of bed and marched to church on a Sunday morning.
Our Culpability In the Eyes of Muhammad.
Most young people when they give up on church are quick to imagine that they have embarked on a heroic search for Greater Truth. How refreshing it seems to such a person to encounter Muhammad’s judgment that everything that we are told in Jewish Scripture and in the Christian Gospel is a pack of lies. Prophet Muhammad—who is the first person ever to appear in the world who truly understood everything that God ever pronounced to any human being anywhere — shakes his finger in scorn at all of us who imagine that we are “People of the Book” – that we have read and have understood the Scripture of the Jews and the Christians.
Yusuf Ali, the translator into English of the Holy Qur’an explains that where Muhammad addresses “Ye people of the Book,” as in Sura 5:60), “there is the most biting irony.”
You people of the Book! [Muhammad is saying]: Do you hate us [Muslims] because we believe in God and not only our scripture but yours also? Perhaps you hate us because we obey, and you are in rebellion against God. Why hate us? There are worse things than our obedience and our faith … Who were the people who incurred the curse of God? (See Deut 11:28 and xxvii: 15-68.) and numerous passages like Hosea viii:14 and ix:1.) Who provoked God’s wrath? (See numerous passages like Deut. 1:34; Matt iii:7)Who forsook God and worshipped evil? (See Jeremiah xvi:11-13.) That is your record. Is that why you hate us?
(Unless otherwise stated, all my selections from the Qur’an are chosen from The Holy Qur’an, translated and with a commentary by A. Yusuf Ali (Brentwood, Maryland: Amana corp., 1983.)
It is clear to Muhammad and consequently clear to every Muslim that our resistance to the message of the Prophet is inexcusable – understandable only as hostility to truth generated in our minds by Satan.
**You Have Been Warned.
Prophet Muhammad’s thinking about Jews and Judaism, about Jesus, about Christianity and the Church is absolutely authoritative. Any Jew or and Christian who imagines that he is free to turn his back on the Prophet’s definitive explication of Jewish and Christian Scripture should understand what awaits him: Muhammad himself will deliver upon each and every one the physical humiliation that in Muhammad’s time and place stubborn schoolboys could expect when they ignore their teachers.
O ye people of the Book! Believe in what We have now revealed, confirming what was already with you before We obliterate some features (or faces) and turn them front to back or back to front, or curse them as we cursed the Sabbath-breakers. For the decision of God will be carried out. (Qur’an 4: 47.)
If these sadistic words do not impress us, consider this:
The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messengers and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is execution or crucifixion, or that they have their alternate hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land. That is their disgrace in this world and a heavy punishment in the Hereafter, except for those who repent before they fall into your power (Qur’an: 5:33-34.)
Christians who think of their salvation as invested in the life and sacrifice and resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth must think again:
When Jesus came with clear Signs he said: “Now have I have come to you with wisdom, and to make clear to you some points on which you dispute. Therefore, fear God and obey me. For Allah, He is my Lord and your Lord. So worship Him. This is a straight way. Qur’an 43:63-64,
In this light, the hostility of Christians to the message of the Prophet is totally incomprehensible, except as disloyalty to Jesus Himself – who Muhammad tells us acknowledged Islam from His earliest (and we do mean earliest) days:
Then she [Mary] pointed to the babe [in the manger.] They said: “How can we talk to one who is a child in the cradle? He [Jesus] said “ I am indeed a servant of Allah. He hath given me revelation and made me a Prophet. Qur’an 19:29-30.
A Look at Muhammad’s Basic Missionary Method.
Since the Al-Qaeda invasion of the United States on September 11, 2001, amateur theologians of Islam, some claiming to be Muslim, but most not, have sprung up all across the landscape offering the insight that violent struggle is only one among many rightful applications of the term jihad and that only a fringe-group of extremists actually equate the word jihad with violence. But the effort of great souls to wring another meaning from the Qur’an or the many volumes of ahadith fails all the well-known tests of hermeneutics. In any debate on the matter which turns on exegesis of the holy texts, the jihadists always win.
Note, for example, this exchange (from the transcript of the trial of Muslim cleric and professor Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman for his part in the assassination of President Sadat.) [Several pages of this transcript appear in Gabriel, Islam and Terrorism , pp. 159-161. Sheik Rahman (who died just a few weeks ago.) never denied a role in ridding the world of Sadat, but affirms that the deed was done as a religious duty, an abundantly obvious case of the duty of jihad: Sadat, said the Sheik, was an infidel, not a true Muslim because he negotiated the peace treaty at Camp David with “the grandchildren of monkeys and pigs,” and because “he declared that all religions are equal” and because he danced with Mrs. Carter. Recklessly, the Attorney General opens a theological debate:
Attorney General: Jihad is not killing. This is not Islam’s teaching. Jihad is a spiritual fight against evil, poverty, sickness and sin. Killing is only from the devil.
Sheik Rahman: From where does the attorney general come up with this understanding? Are there verses in the Quran that I don’t know about that say that jihad is a spiritual fight against evil, poverty, sickness and sin? Perhaps there is new inspiration from Allah that our attorney general received recently and the rest of the Muslims do not know.
Because the Attorney General of Egypt failed to persuade the court on the theological point – that jihad does not mean killing – the court dismissed the case against the popular Islamist leader – who subsequently went to America and organized the first assault against the World Trade Centre, for which crime he went to a U.S. federal prison — where he died just a few weeks ago.
The Egyptian court had do difficulty accepting that there were no verses in the Qur’an that Sheik Rahman does not know about. Nor should we doubt that the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeni spoke from his impressive familiarity with all the sacred texts when he explained: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: “Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you all . . . People cannot be made obedient except with the sword. [Quoted from Amir Taheri, The Spirit of Allah: Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, pages 20 & 45, by Spencer, Politically Incorrect, pages 190-191.]
Still, our own woods are full of non-Muslim apologists for Islam – Karen Armstrong being only the most egregious and financially successful to date — who assure us that they are better qualified than all those eccentric Islamists to instruct us about what is really there in the Qur’an, deep down.
[To be continued……..]
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