Introduction
As a religious sect, the Nusayris have historically lived as a secretive minority. They have long been described as one of the Shi’ite ghulat, “exaggerators” or “extremist Shi’ites”, which all share some notion of the deification of Ali ibn Abu Talib, as is the case with the Nusayris. Many features of Nusayri religion, however, set it apart both from “mainstream” Islam, either Sunni or Shi’ite, and from the other so-called “ghulat” sects. This paper will examine two major theological distinctives of the Nusayri religion, the concept of divine manifestations, and antinominianism, with a view to understanding its position outside of mainstream Islamic thought.
Today Nusayris number at least 600,000[1] (although many sources claim numbers as high as 2.2 million), and are found predominantly in Syria and in the southern Turkish cities of Antakya, Iskenderun, Adana, and Tarsus.[2] As with many heterodox sects, the Nusayris have suffered oppression and marginalization since their founding. Jacques Weulersse writes: “Isolated in rough country, surrounded by a hostile population, henceforth without communications with the outside world, the 'Alawis [another name for the Nusayris] began to live out their solitary existence in secrecy and repression.”[3]
In a historic exception to this pattern of repression, the sect has risen to particular prominence since the 1970’s when Syria’s government came under Nusayri control. The current Syrian presidency and many influential positions of leadership continue to be held by Nusayris.
The name “Nusayri” is itself a subject of some dispute. In 1922 when an independent Nusayri state was created by French authorities and called the “Dawlat al-Alawiyyin” (The Alawi State), many Nusayris rejoiced that their “lawful name”, Alawis, had been restored.[4] And while most prefer to be called Alawi, perceiving the name Nusayri as a pejorative label, the sect has always been known as Nusayri. Referring to this specific group as Alawi is further complicated by the fact that the term Alawi can refer to any Shiite as a follower of Ali. By a similar linguistic complication, Turkey’s Nusayris are normally grouped together with the other “Alevi” groups which have no historic connection to the Nusayris. However, their own secretiveness has prevented the Nusayris from engaging in any serious effort at distinguishing themselves.
While many fatwas and treatises have been written against the Nusayri religion, in evidence to their heterodox status, the most well known comes from Ibn Taymiyya, a prominent 13th-14th century Muslim jurist and scholar. Ibn Taymiyya described the Nusayris as “greater disbelievers than the Jews and Christians” and categorized them as among the worst of polytheists. His major theological objections to the sect concern the the Nusayri conception of God and their preference for allegorical interpretation of Islamic law and the Qur’an, which are outworkings, respectively, of the two theological concepts to be dealt with here.
Such strong polemical language against the Nusayris is not limited to the 13th century, however. Many speeches, tracts, and websites continue to be produced to “warn true believers” about the dangers of the Nusayri religion. In Turkey on October 6, 1998, for example, Recai Kutan, the leader of a prominent Islamist party, publicly called the Nusayris a “perverted” sect, which sparked backlash from Nusayris as well as from human rights groups in Turkey.
The Emergence of Nusayri Religion
The religion of the Nusayris emerged in the middle of the ninth century in Iraq.[5] There is debate as to the origin of the sect and its name, but most contemporary historians accept that the eponym and founder was Muhammad ibn Nusayr. Ibn Nusayr may have been a supporter of Ali al-Hadi, the tenth Shi’i Imam (d. 868)[6], although Nusayri tradition teaches that Ibn Nusayr was a follower and companion of Hasan al-Askari, the eleventh Shi’i Imam. There is evidence that Ibn Nusayr independently began to proclaim the divinity of the Imam and that the Imam denounced him for this reason.[7] After the death of the 11th Imam, however, and with the developing doctrine of “ghayba”, Ibn Nusayr claimed to be the prophet and bab, or “door” of Hasan al-Askari who was a manifestation of God.
Nusayri sources claim that Hasan al-Askari entrusted this new revelation to Muhammad ibn Nusayr, which was to be revealed only to initiates. Al-Tabarani, an important Nusayri theologian recounts a story said to be transmitted by Muhammad ibn Jundab, an aide of al-Askari, in which a “delegation of Persian horseman” came to visit the Imam. When they arrived they found Ibn Nusayr standing next to the Imam. After the delegation had made their requests of the Imam and given him coins in tribute, al-Askari ordered Ibn Nusayr to sign the coins and return them to the Persians. On one side of the coin was written, “There is no god but the master al-Hasan al-Askari, his ism Muhammad, and his bab Muhammad [b. Nusayr].” On the other side was written, “There is no god but al-Hasan al-Askari, his ism Muhammad, and his bab Abu Shuayb Muhammad b. Nusayr b. Bakr al Namiri; whoever says otherwise is lying.” The story continues to vindicate the Nusayri religion over the claims of the Ishaqiyyas, a sect with competing claims and similar origins.[8]
The Nusayri religion continued to develop, particularly under Abu ‘Abd Allah al-Husayn b. Hamdan al-Khasibi (d. 957), a successor to Ibn Nusayr. Al-Khasibi is credited with “unifying the sect and consolidating their teachings.”[9] His remaining works are an important source of information about the sect and he is still venerated by Nusayris today. Another successor, Surur b. al-Kasim al-Tabarani (d.1034-35) was also influential in shaping and preserving Nusayri theology and his works “form the major part of the written tradition of the Nusayris.” [10]
Divine Manifestations
The Nusayri venerate Ali ibn Abu Talib as “supreme and eternal God”.[11] Ali is said to be the creator and source of life, which is reflected in accounts of Nusayri confessions of faith. Such confessions include, “I confess there is no god but Ali”[12] and “There is no God but Ali Ibn Abi Talib, with the bald forehead and temples, the adorable, and no veil but the Lord Muhammad, worthy to be praised, and no door other than the Lord Salman al-Farisi, the object of desire.”[13] It is Ali who taught the Qur’an to Muhammad and Ali who is the God of the Qur’an.
Nusayri sources claim that Ali eventually proclaimed his own divinity in a public sermon in which he declared, “...I am the Lord of lords, the possessor of necks. I am al-Ali (the most high)... I am the one who commands life and death, who begat Jesus in the womb of his mother, Mary, and who sent the apostles and instructed the prophets!” The Qur’an itself is said to confirm Ali’s divinity, not in its outward meaning, but in its inner, allegorical, meaning. Several traditions are also ascribed to Muhammad in which the prophet himself testifies to the divinity of Ali. One important such testimony of Muhammad about Ali is related by Salman al-Farisi, lending it particular weight.[14]
Thus, the Nusayri concept of divine manifestations or “incarnations” has two important characteristics, it is trinitarian and cyclical. God is said to have revealed himself in trinitarian fashion throughout history, the ultimate manifestation of which is in the three persons of Ali, Muhammad, and Salman al-Farisi, a Persian companion and evangelist of the prophet credited with masterminding the important “Battle of the Ditch”. This trio is often referred to by their initials in Arabic, Ayn Mim Sin, or AMS. They are also referred to by their “titles” which pass from manifestation to manifestation throughout history. Ali is associated with the Mana or “Meaning”, Muhammad is associated with the Ism or “Name” (sometimes called the Hijab or “Veil”), and Salman al-Farisi is associated with the Bab, or “Door”.[15]
At the root of the Nusayri concept of God and the divine manifestations is the Nusayri cosmogony and cosmology, which resembles other gnostic cosmogonies and shares many concepts with Ismailism. From the beginning of time, Nusayris are said to have been “brilliant heavenly bodies and luminous stars, conscious of the distinction between obedience and disobedience. They did not eat, drink or pass excrement.” Beholding and praising God, who is Ali Ibn Abi Talib, they did nothing else for 7,077 years and seven hours, until they committed their first sin which was to boast about their own greatness, saying, “Surely he has created no more noble creatures than we are.”[16]
Ali tests the Nusayris further, appearing to them seven times and demanding that they recognize and obey him. During these appearances, Ali was always accompanied by Muhammad (the Ism) and Salman al-Farisi (the Bab). When they refused or were unable to obey, Ali created a “lower sphere” in which to punish them and “put an end to their doubt about his nature.” He also told them that he would give them human forms, as opposed to their luminary ones, and would appear to them in “a veil akin to their human forms” together with the Ism and Bab.[17]
The first of these manifestations of the Mana, Ism, and Bab was in the characters of Abel, Adam, and Gabriel respectively. The proceeding manifestations were in Seth, Noah, and Yail Ibn Fatin; Joseph, Jacob, and Ham Ibn Kush; Joshua, Moses, and Dan Ibn Usbaut; Asaf, Solomon, and Abd Allah Ibn Siman; Simon Peter, Jesus, and Rawzaba Ibn al-Marzuban; and finally in Ali, Muhammad, and Salman al-Farisi. In each manifestation it is the historically less important or subordinate person which is actually the Mana, the manifestation of God, Ali. For example, with regard to Jesus, it is Simon Peter who is the Mana and Jesus is only his Ism. In this way, the entire system of divine manifestations in seven cycles supports the belief that Muhammad is actually subordinate to Ali despite the outward appearance to the contrary.
Thus, there are seven manifestations of God which have occurred in seven cycles throughout history. As one ancient Nusayri catechism affirms in the fifth question “How many times did our master veil himself and appear in human form?” The answer is that “He veiled himself seven times.”[18] The Druze also see seven divine manifestations in seven periods and, as Moosa points out, another ghulat sect, the Ahl-i Haqq, also conceives of time in seven cycles. He traces this ultimately back to a Harranian belief that the creator was manifested in seven forms. However, Moosa sees the specific instance of this view in Nusayri religion as “based on the Ismaili concept of seven emanations of the divine nature.”[19] He claims that the Nusayri conception is similar to Ismailism but is lacking in philosophical subtlety, and further claims that the Nusayris were “incapable of philosophical speculation,” a claim which seems difficult to justify.
The manifestation is always said to have occurred in trinitarian fashion, but the relationship of the persons of the Nusayri trinity are significantly different from that of Christianity. It may be that the Nusayri concept derives from the Christian one ultimately, and one Nusayri source even identifies Ali with the Father, Muhammad with the Son, and Salman al-Farisi with the Holy Spirit. However, it is clear that the identification is with a Muslim misunderstanding of the Christian Trinity in which the Holy Spirit is actually the angel Gabriel.[20]
While the three persons of the trinity are always associated with each other, the relationship is not of three coequal or coeternal divine persons. Rather, Ali is said to have created Muhammad and Muhammad created Salman al-Farisi. So the three together are the ultimate manifestation of God, but the Ism and Bab are subordinate and created, and are in fact lesser manifestations of Ali himself. The nature of the manifestation of the trinity in human form has been a subject of dispute in Nusayri theology. Similar to Christian debates about the nature of Christ, some groups maintained a more docetic conception of human “appearances” while others affirmed a formal incarnation of the divine in Ali.[21]
Nusayri sources are united, however, in affirming that the persons of the trinity are, in fact, one. They are committed to the oneness of God as the “fundamental article” of the faith and so make pains to express the unity of the Mana, Ism, and Bab. According to a tradition ascribed to Imam Jafar al-Sadiq, “He who differentiates between the Ism and the Mana has blasphemed, and he who truly worships the Ism has also worshipped the Mana, and he who worships the Ism in place of the Mana is an infidel, but he who worships the Mana through the divine reality of the Ism has in fact professed the oneness of God.”[22] Evidence for this trinitarian perspective is also found in the inner meaning of the Qur’an, particularly in the “bismillah” (in the name of God, the Merciful, the Compassionate) which opens 113 of the suras of the Qur’an. The formula is said to refer to Ali as God, Muhammad as the Merciful, and Salman al-Farisi as the Compassionate.[23]
The role of Muhammad, then, is subordinated to that of Ali, but still his identity as part of the trinity, “elevates” him in comparison with orthodox Islam. Muhammad is the last appearance of the Ism in human form, the first being Adam. He is the intermediary through which Ali created the universe, but is himself created. As the Ism, Muhammad points to, and leads to, Ali, who alone is to be worshipped.[24]
Similarly, the role of Salman al-Farisi is subordinated to Muhammad, yet also part of the trinity. As the Bab, it is from Salman that the Qur’an emanates, equating him with the angel Gabriel, who was the first manifestation of the Bab, Salman. Historically and theologically, Salman al-Farisi holds a prominent role for all Shi’ites, not only because of his close association with Muhammad and the household of the prophet, but because he is believed to be the first to defend the right of Ali to succeed Muhammad as leader of the community.[25] For Nusayris, then, this role is expanded. Salman is the means by which men can know and approach the Mana, Ali.
The divine manifestation in Nusayri religion does not cease with the seven periods up to the time of Ali, however. Since the teaching originated with Muhammad ibn Nusayr who proclaimed the Imam as divine, Nusayris believe that each of the twelve Imams was a divine manifestation and that each of them had a Bab but not an Ism. Rather, the twelve Imams “are spoken of as the culmination of the sixty-three personifications of the Ism.”[26] and the permanent Ism is Muhammad. With the veneration of the Imams as divine, and the assertion that Muhammad Ibn Nusayr is the Bab of Imam Hasan al-Askari, Nusayris constructed a “quasi-historical” list of Babs to accompany the list of Imams. Various miracles are attributed to these Babs, in the pattern of Salman al-Farisi.
Muhammad Ibn Nusayr is the “ultimate bab of this category”[27], the archetypal incarnation of Salman al-Farisi, the third person of the trinity. As with each of the Babs of the Imams, he “transmits [the] divine knowledge to the faithful of his age.” When the eleventh Imam died without leaving an heir, Ibn Nusayr also became the Bab of the twelfth Imam, Muhammad, the Mahdi. As Bar-Asher and Kofsky note, al-Tabarani writes very briefly about the first ten Babs of the Imams, but devotes a very detailed section to Ibn Nusayr. In a significant passage from al-Tabarani’s Kitab Al-Ma’arif, Hasan al-Askari instructs a seeker to “learn the guide-posts” of his religion from him who is rejected as a ghulat and denounced as a heretic, namely Muhammad ibn Nusayr.[28] Ibn Nusayr was succeeded by Muhammad al-Jannan al-Junbulani, and then al-Khasibi, and eventually al-Tabarani, each of whom continued to shape Nusayri theology.
Antinominianism
Nusayris typically do not perform the Muslim ritual prayer, nor do they worship in mosques, fast during Ramadan, pay the mandatory alms tax, or perform the pilgrimage to Mecca. This outward disregard for the central obligations of Islam is justified by a tradition of complex allegorical interpretation.
As with the conception of God, the Nusayri antinominian position regarding religious duties and the allegorical interpretation of Scripture are rooted in the Nusayri gnostic cosmogony. Since Nusayris find themselves on earth as a consequence of their fall from a state of contemplation of the divine splendor, the religious life is a “mission to set his soul on the path leading back to the divine world from which it was banished.”[29] This return to the divine world occurs through several stages, the goal of which is knowledge of God in the gnostic sense, described as ma’rifa. In fact, the very title of an important Nusayri text by al-Tabarani, Kitab Al-Ma’arif, “clearly alludes to gnostic knowledge being the core of the Nusayri faith.”[30]
Worship of God is identified with gnosis, so that it is progressing in this secret knowledge of Ali which constitutes Nusayri worship. It is with an injunction to attain this gnostic mystery that al-Tabarani begins Kitab Al-Ma’arif. This being the case, “inner knowledge thus becomes the conceptual axis” of al-Tabarani’s work and of the Nusayri interpretation of religion in general.[31] In fact, a tradition attributed to Hasan al-Askari explains that, God had lifted the obligations of worship according to commandments and “only wanted them to know Him, for gnosis (ma’rifa) is the worship of God.”[32] Thus, it is the reduction of worship to gnostic knowledge of God which leads to the rejection of traditional ritual and literal reading of Scripture.
The stage on which this gnostic ascent takes place is the system of metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls which binds humans to an unending mortal cycle. For Nusayri males there is hope of escaping this cycle through ma’rifa, which can eventually lead to again becoming a “luminous entity” after passing through successively more perfect bodies.[33] But such hope does not exist for women, who are believed to be created from demons, or “the sins of demons”[34], nor for Sunnis or other non-Nusayris who are doomed to repeat the cycles of metempsychosis into animals, plants, “short plants”, trash, “dry plants” or, in the worst cases, into insects[35].
Not only is salvation not to be achieved through obedience to religious obligations such as the five pillars present in orthodox Sunnism, al-Tabarani writes that “the precepts of fasting, prayer, pilgrimage, and holy war are demonic, leading to perdition.” [36] The pillars of Islam are therefore radically reinterpreted according to their “inner meaning” or essence which is also gnostic in nature. The first pillar described is Salat or ritual prayer, which is traditionally performed five times per day, and is here reinterpreted as knowledge of the five members of the holy family, Fatir (Fatma), Hasan, Husayn, and Muhsin (or Muhassin). Nusayri texts identify Hasan and Husayn as angels[37] and elaborates significantly on the role of Fatir/Fatima, who is in some sense divine. This is something of a paradox given the Nusayri conception of women as the product of demons, but Fatma is equated with the essence of the prophet and the source from which the Imams emanate. She is also the personification of the Night of Power, the night during the month of Ramadan on which prayer is worth one thousand months of prayer given at any other time.[38]
Qur’anic verses regarding prayer are allegorized by the same principle. For example, al-Tabarani comments on Q. 29:45, “Prayer forbids indecency and dishonor”, saying that “it is rather the ism who commands and forbids, and he is the ruler of the whole kingdom”. The indecency and dishonor are then interpreted as Abu Bakr and Umar, the first two caliphs. They are described as, “the root of every falsification and the head of every hypocrisy.”[39]
The rules for ablution, or ritual washing before prayer, are also allegorized in a complex system associating the five facial cavities with the five members of the holy family. The distinction between fingers and toes is associated with the distinction between men and women (represented by the toes). And the Shi’ite tradition of wiping, rather than washing the feet is identified with “the inferior degree of the defeminized woman in the divine realm,” since women, as such, cannot enter the divine realm. [40]
In one interpretation, the fast of Ramadan (saum) is allegorized and said to apply to speech rather than food, in the example of the vows of silence by Mary and Zecharia in the Qur’an. The interpretation is rooted in a tradition which describes the silence of Abd Allah, the father of Muhammad, during the month of Ramadan. In this antinominian interpretation, Abd Allah represents the traditional obligations of Ramadan and Muhammad represents the breaking of the fast, thus lifting the religious obligation. However, al-Tabarani expands the interpretation to apply the concept of the fast to the principle of taqiyya, the Nusayri prohibition on revealing religious secrets to the uninitiated until a time of eschatological unveiling.
It is the principle of taqiyya which preserves the secrecy of the Nusayri religion. As with other Shi’ites, Nusayris are expected, even commanded, to hide their beliefs in the presence of outsiders. For the Nusayris this is extended to require a “perfect dissimulation of external devotion, exceeding that of ordinary Muslims”.[41] In the presence of Shi’ites, Nusayris are expected to talk and act like Shi’ites, and in the presence of Sunnis, they are expected to behave like Sunnis, even in the observance of rituals and obligations which they believe to be abhorrent. Moosa relates a Nusayri metaphor in which Nusayris are a “body” which is not corrupted or affected by putting on “the clothing” of any of the other sects. Jihad is also apparently associated with taqiyya by some Nusayris, who view the struggle implied in Jihad as insisting on concealing the secrets of the religion from unbelievers, even when this concealment puts a person in serious danger. [42]
Conclusion
From Nusayri texts themselves, Nusayris have historically embraced their own rejection by orthodox or “mainstream” Islam and have reciprocated the sentiment in such practices as the ceremonial cursing of Sunni caliphs, for example, in the event that a Nusayri is forced to pretend to perform the Salat. Similarly, while Nusayris have been labeled ghulat or “exaggerators”, they have called orthodox Muslims muqassira, “those who fell short” with regard to their recognition of the divinity of Ali. Al-Tabarani significantly wrote of the Nusayri religion that “The true Shi’a...is the brand of Shi’a denounced by “mainstream” Shi’ism as heresy.”[43] This radical separating from the mainstream seems to necessarily preclude the Nusayri religion from being associated with Islam as historically understood.
While some authors have tried to show how the Nusayri religion is legitimately within the fold of Islam, the majority concur that it is better described as a separate religion, a conclusion which seems justified. The Nusayri concept of God as trinitarian and manifested in historical cycles cannot be reconciled with the Qur’an as it is understood by Islam or with any traditional Muslim sources. The Nusayri understanding is unique and seems to be a syncretistic combination of various religious concepts. Moosa identifies distinct Harranian, Zoroastrian, Christian, and gnostic elements in Nusayri beliefs and practices. This conflicts with the orthodox Islamic understanding of Islam and the Qur’an as revealed directly from God to Muhammad without human interpolation.
The Nusayri cosmogony, as the basis for theology, is also particularly un-Islamic. It does not derive from or rely on any text recognized by orthodox Islam in all its diversity. While several individual elements in the cosmogony are at odds with Islam, such as the demonic origin of women or the transmigration of souls, it is the very existence of such an authoritative cosmogony as a source for theology which seems to be irreconcilable with Islam.
Finally, the radical antinominianism in Nusayri religion not only requires the rejection of essential practices of orthodox Islam, such as the profession of faith or the pilgrimage to Mecca, but also arises out of allegorical interpretations which could not be arrived at outside Nusayri circles and which seem constructed in order to support the gnostic structure of the Nusayri religion.
Therefore, by defining themselves in opposition and exclusion to all other Muslims and embracing beliefs and practices which defy the most basic obligations of Islam, Nusayris seem to willingly place themselves outside of Islam itself. Furthermore, with the doctrine of taqiyya, any attempt at adopting Muslim beliefs and practices or expressed desire to be associated with mainstream Islam must necessarily be suspected as disingenuous, particularly given the “negative self-definition” that Nusayris have of themselves which honors those who are rejected by other Muslims as heretics.
The complex history which resulted in the development of the Nusayri religion is
almost as fascinating as the religious system it produced, which commends itself for further study. The presence and influence of Nusayris in Syria and Turkey seems still only superficially understood, and the difference between Nusayri religious expression in the two countries must be greater than the current literature would suggest, given the stark cultural, social, and linguistic differences represented by the Turkish-Syrian border. Still, broadly speaking, the Nusayri concept of divine manifestations and the radical antinominianism rooted in gnostic principles, may be understood as the major distinctives of this religion, an understanding of which brings the rest of this religion’s intricacies to light.
Bibliography
Bar-Asher, Meir M. and Aryeh Kofsky. Dogma and Ritual in ‘Kitab al-Ma’arif’ By the Nusayri Theologian Abu Said Maymun B. Al-Qasim Al-Tabarani (d. 426/1034-35). Leiden. Koninklijke Brill NV, 2005.
Bar-Asher, Meir M. and Aryeh Kofsky, The Nusayri-‘Alawi Religion: An Enquiry into Its Theology and Liturgy. Leiden. Koninklijke Brill NV, The Netherlands, 2002.
Halm, H. “Nusayriyya”. Encyclopaedia of Islam. http://www.encislam.brill.nl/data/EncIslam/C6/COM-0876.html .
Moosa, Matti. Extremist Shiites: The Ghulat Sects. Syracuse. Syracuse University Press, 1988.
Pipes, Daniel. “Syria: The Next Generation”, 1989, www.danielpipes.org/article/190 .
Sinanoglu, Abdulhamit. Nusayrilerin Inanc Dunyasi ve Kutsal Kitabi. Istanbul, Esra Yayinlari, 1997.
[1] H. Halm, “Nusayriyya”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://www.encislam.brill.nl/data/EncIslam/C6/COM-0876.html
[2] Abdulhamit Sinanoglu, Nusayrilerin Inanc Dunyasi ve Kutsal Kitabi, (Istanbul: Esra Yayinlari, 1997), 24. (Turkish)
[3] quoted by Daniel Pipes in “Syria: The Next Generation”, 1989, from www.danielpipes.org/article/190 (note in brackets added)
[4] Matti Moosa, Extremist Shiites: The Ghulat Sects, (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1988), 255.
[5] H. Halm, “Nusayriyya”, Encyclopaedia of Islam, http://www.encislam.brill.nl/data/EncIslam/C6/COM-0876.html
[6] ibid.
[7] Halm, Nusayriyya.
[8] Meir M. Bar-Asher and Aryeh Kofsky, Dogma and Ritual in ‘Kitab al-Ma’arif’ By the Nusayri Theologian Abu Said Maymun B. Al-Qasim Al-Tabarani (d. 426/1034-35) (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2005), 55.
[9] Moosa, 263
[10] Halm, Nusayriyya.
[11] Halm, Nusayriyya.
[12] Sinanoglu, 38.
[13] Moosa, 319.
[14] Moosa, 325-326.
[15] Moosa, 311 and Halm, Nusayriyya.
[16] Moosa, 315.
[17] Moosa, 315.
[18] Meir M. Bar-Asher and Aryeh Kofsky, The Nusayri-‘Alawi Religion: An Enquiry into Its Theology and Liturgy, (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, The Netherlands, 2002), 171.
[19] Moosa, 312.
[20] Sinanoglu, 46. Sinanoglu actually makes the same mistake, assuming that Christians believe the Holy Spirit to be the angel Gabriel.
[21] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, The Nusayri-‘Alawi Religion, chapter 1.
[22] quoted in Moosa, 319.
[23] Moosa, 318.
[24] Moosa, 343.
[25] Moosa, 347.
[26] Moosa, 353.
[27] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, Dogma and Ritual in Kitab Al-Ma’arif
[28] ibid. 53.
[29] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, The Nusayri-Alawi Religion, 75.
[30] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, Dogma and Ritual in Kitab Al-Ma’arif, 46.
[31] ibid. 46.
[32] ibid. 49.
[33] ibid. 76.
[34] Halm, Nusayriyya
[35] Moosa, 362.
[36] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, Dogma and Ritual in Kitab Al-Ma’arif, 58.
[37] Sinanoglu, 46.
[38] Moosa, 356.
[39] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, Dogma and Ritual in Kitab Al-Ma’arif, 59.
[40] ibid. 60.
[41] ibid. 63.
[42] Moosa, 414.
[43] Bar-Asher and Kofsky, Dogma and Ritual in Kitab Al-Ma’arif, 58
Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Muslim. Show all posts
Monday, April 16, 2007
Particularity and Pluralism in Muslim Christian Dialogue
In many circles Muslim-Christian dialogue has unfortunately come to be associated with a relativistic religious pluralism and skepticism, particularly on the Christian side, as a necessary precondition for fruitful exchange. This has meant that many Christians seem to feel obligated to abandon the distinctive claims of Christianity, particularly those which are presumed to be of offense to Muslims, or to reinterpret those claims so broadly or metaphorically as to be able to read into them a meaning which is perceived to be more acceptable to Muslim sensibilities. This paper will argue that the effect of this “rejection of Christian uniqueness”[1] as a precondition for Muslim-Christian dialogue is an undermining or invalidating of the dialogue itself, because of the philosophical and religious problems associated with such a position, and because this type of approach robs dialogue of its practical relevance for everyday Muslims and Christians. On the other hand, examples of robust Christian positions which affirm the distinctive claims of Christianity can model a better starting place for dialogue
The impulse to downplay or retreat from distinctive religious claims and unique religious identity, which Lamin Sanneh identifies as “particularity”, is predominantly a Western Christian phenomenon. This is perhaps not surprising given the historic interest that Christians have had in studying and interacting with Islam and Muslims compared to the relative lack of interest on the part of Muslims to understand and interact with Christianity. Albert Hourani, a Muslim scholar, confirms this tendency: “To the modern interest of some Christians in Muslim doctrine, there corresponds very little Muslim interest in Christian doctrine.”[2]
Perhaps for reasons historic and philosophical, this Christian interest in coming to terms with Muslim doctrine has been accompanied by a concern for dialogue and often an over-eagerness to avoid or abandon matters of Christian doctrine which might be of offense to Muslims. Interestingly, Hourani sees the lack of Muslim interest in Christianity as the result of Islam’s assurance that its conception of God is the only one that is tenable. He seems to take for granted that this type of confidence can only translate into a disregard for other religions, but there is no argument to this effect. In fact, what is also left unsaid is the implicit notion that it must be Christianity’s contrary tendency, i.e., not to be “sure that theirs is the only tenable doctrine of the nature of God and the ways in which He acts in the world,”[3] that has resulted in its ability to generate genuine interest in understanding Islam. But what evidence is there to make such a connection?
Bernard Lewis seems to make a similar assumption in his provocatively titled article, “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go to Hell”.[4] He categorizes religion very broadly into either triumphalism, characterized by its conviction that either Islam or Christianity is the true religion and an accompanying invitation for everyone else to go to Hell, or relativism, which holds that “I have my god, you have your god, and others have theirs.”[5] Lewis seems to leave no room for a Muslim or Christian to preserve the distinctive truth claims of his or her religion without falling into the camp of the triumphalists. It seems that he has not imagined the possibility of Muslims or Christians who do hold to the orthodox notion of Islam and Christianity as mutually exclusive and who also take initiatives to peacefully coexist and engage in fruitful dialogue with each other. Lewis blames the history of conflict between Muslims and Christians on what he sees as the predominant trend of triumphalism, thus suggesting that the hope for peaceful resolution is to be found in relativism, which he implies could be the result of “future understanding” of the similarities between Islam and Christianity. He agrees that it is on the Christian side that what he calls triumphalism is “increasingly under attack”, giving way to relativism, while “there is little sign as yet of a parallel development in Islam.” But is there good reason to believe that dissolving the unique claims of Christianity into relativism offers this kind of hope, or that we should adopt this kind of approach even if it could resolve historic conflicts?
In the article mentioned above, Albert Hourani insightfully describes categories of Western attitudes toward Islam. The first centers around Kant’s “distinction between the one true religion and the different systems of though through which men have tried to express it.”[6] In this view, Islam and Christianity are both imperfect expressions of the one transcendent reality. If this is an accurate description, then we are to conclude either that all religions (including Islam and Christianity) are basically the same, which highlights the need for tolerance, or that each religion reveals true values which are less evident in others, which highlights the need for dialogue. He offers Wilfred Cantwell Smith as an example of this approach. Cantwell Smith concedes that the Bible is the Word of God only in the same sense that the Qur’an can be called the Word of God, that is, because “it is a word through which men have come to know God.”[7]
From his introduction, however, it seems that Hourani would also share some aspects of this position. He writes that “…just as Christianity is unique for a Christian, there are other senses in which it should be regarded as one among several manifestations of the human spirit, one member of a class – the class of all religions…and one religion can be used to throw light on another.”[8]
As Lamin Sanneh points out, however, these types of approach, as expressed by Albert Hourani and Bernard Lewis as well as by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, raise many questions and criticisms. Sanneh calls attention to the “species of Protestant skepticism that says our own religion does not matter while that of others does.” The apparent tendency is that Christians are tempted to “give away” foundational aspects of Christianity which highlight its uniqueness in order to mitigate the sense of competing claims as a way to engender trust and promote dialogue.
Something similar to the thought that Christianity and Islam are equally imperfect expressions of reality underlies these impulses. Sanneh’s observation, however, is that if this is the case and the nature of dialogue is to “increase our grasp of the Reality of which we have only partial, imperfect glimpses in our own religion” then “we are left with a melting-pot solution to religious differences.”[9] As Sanneh’s comment suggests, this approach betrays a reductive, utilitarian view of religion in which the ultimate goal is for humanity to acquire the right information about “Reality” or to adopt the right kind of morality. Religion is reduced to intellectual insight or moral improvement, which is contrary to the historic teachings of both Islam and Christianity.
Such a philosophical presupposition raises the question of the necessity for dialogue. If a determination has already been made, discounting the distinctive claims of Islam and Christianity (or any other religion), then dialogue seems to be a futile effort. Those who share this presupposition might be seen as doing nothing more than patting each other on the back in dialogue, congratulating one another for agreeing with, or benefiting from, the pre-established conclusion. He argues that worthwhile Christian dialogue should recognize, rather than rescind, particularity. He makes a distinction between particularity, as the distinctiveness of a religion’s claims, and particularism, as the conviction that one’s own distinct claims are the only true ones.
Another criticism raised by an insistence on this type of pluralism as a precondition for dialogue is that it begs the question as to which beliefs and teachings of each religion are to be adopted or rejected. Where would the criteria for making that kind of determination come from? It would obviously have to come from outside either religion, setting up some other standard as the arbiter of divine revelation in an effort to see the religions as equal. But on what basis could such criteria be said to be authoritative? If, as Bernard Lewis suggests, we are to prefer relativism to triumphalism, on what basis should those whom he would describe as triumphalists abandon their convictions in order to become relativists?
Similarly, Sanneh asks, “If we use Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist objections to rescind Christian particularity how is that better or worse than using Christian objections to wreak similar havoc with Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist particularity?”[10] This highlights a serious problem with this type of pluralism as a presupposition for dialogue. If religious pluralism is to be adopted in light of the multiplicity of religious faiths with sincere believers making mutually contradictory claims, then the effect is to invalidate the distinctive claims of Islam as well as Christianity.
It is not difficult to understand why Muslims would not find such an approach endearing. It is more likely, in fact, that Muslims would be surprised by the relativistic implication that Islam is not “valid for them or anybody else.”[11] It is seems unlikely that what appears to be an eagerness to minimize or abandon unique Christian doctrines could engender trust on the part of Muslims. If we are so recklessly dismissive about our own faith, Muslims who do honor the distinctive claims of their religion will have little incentive to identify with us or trust us in religious matters.
In the West, however, it is often accepted as axiomatic that religion is a purely individual matter. Christianity is reduced to “choice and option”, so the religious cost of pluralism is hardly felt in comparison to the alternative, a burden of guilt associated with taking the unique claims of Christianity seriously. It is assumed that holding to the unique truth of Christian claims betrays some arrogance or religious imperialism. But such a charge is self-defeating. As Sanneh asks, “Have we in fact abandoned the one-sidedness we condemn in others when we proceed to make our own formulations – or those of Muslims or others – normative for all religions?” In other words, if we accuse particularist claims of being inherently arrogant or “one-sided” we take on an argument which Alvin Plantinga describes as a “philosophical tar baby”[12], since any claim about religions, including the claim that all religions are equally valid, excludes all opposing positions and is subject to the same accusation of arrogance. A Christian or a Muslim might ask why he or she should accept an exclusive claim made by a liberal theologian over the exclusive claims already present in Christianity and Islam as revealed in their scriptures.
Pragmatically, if the impulse to concede Christian convictions arises, at least in part, from a desire to establish common ground with Muslims and improve our relationships with them, then we ought to look for evidence that such a strategy is or has been successful. Much to the contrary, however, as Sanneh points out, “Just at the time when the liberal West is prepared, rightly or wrongly, to abandon all matters of religious offense to Muslims…Muslims hold tenaciously to a view of the perfidious West”. It seems quite legitimate to ask if there is some support in the history of Muslim Christian encounter for the notion that a pluralistic view of religion will have a salutary impact on that relationship. But the call for dialogue, accompanied by the call for a “rejection of Christian uniqueness”, has been present for at least a generation, and has also coincided with “a deafening Muslim chorus proclaiming the West as a religious antagonist”, suggesting, perhaps, that the approach of the liberal West is ineffective at best.
Bearing in mind, however, that a majority of Muslims and Christians do not live in the West and will not share the religious pluralism of Immanuel Kant or Wilfred Cantwell Smith, it should also be questioned in what way dialogue on this basis will represent their concerns. It seems evident that one of the most significant values of Muslim-Christian dialogue is that it can serve as a model for how everyday Muslims and Christians can relate to one another. However, if we maintain the presupposition that real conversation and engagement can’t occur unless we concede certain distinctive religious claims or adopt a position of religious pluralism in general, we alienate the majority of the world’s Muslims and Christians from dialogue. And to the extent that the non-Western world is impacted by religious developments in the West, we effectively communicate the undesirable message that dialogue between Muslims and Christians, as they actually are in their mainstream expressions worldwide, is impossible. If we are looking to achieve the greatest global benefit from Muslim-Christian dialogue, therefore, it seems that we would be well-served to abandon hope that the rest of the world will adopt religious pluralism and instead focus our energies on modeling a way for Muslims and Christians to engage in fruitful conversation while honoring their respective religious particularity. After all, it is the Muslims and Christians who hold the most exclusivistic positions with regard to each other who stand to benefit most from learning a way to dialogue.
Returning to Hourani’s categories of Western attitudes towards Islam, and to take Hourani’s categories out of order, his third approach is the view that “Islam, like other religions outside Christianity, can be seen, so to speak, as stopping places on the road to the Church.”[13] This position allows for non-Christian religions such as Islam to be “accidental” sources of truth and inspiration for their followers, while maintaining that Christianity is somehow the “ultimate meeting-point of all faiths”.[14] By emphasizing areas of commonality between Islam and Christianity, this approach attempts to “make possible cooperation in the natural order”.[15]
This position is represented by Robin Zaehner, who accepts Muhammad as a prophet, since “there is no criterion by which the gift of prophecy can be withheld from him unless it is withheld from the Hebrew prophets also.”[16] According to Zaehner, when understood correctly, there is also no contradiction between the Qur’an and the New Testament. In fact, he tries to read Christian interpretations into Qur’anic passages. While this position attempts to preserve a unique place for Christianity, it does so at the cost of both Christian and Muslim uniqueness. Muhammad is included as a prophet, which seems to secularize the notion of prophecy. It can hardly be the same voice speaking in such contradictory messages through Jesus and Muhammad, for example, especially in the Muslim view of revelation as the dictated speech of God. And the Qur’an is interpreted in a Christian light, which seems to completely discount the history of Qur’anic interpretation by Muslims themselves.
The second approach Hourani outlines is represented by Hendrik Kraemer. Kraemer, as Cantwell Smith, was also brought up in the Calvinist tradition, but comes to very different conclusions with regard to Christianity’s relationship to Islam. Kraemer points to the Incarnation as the unique, definitive moment of God’s revelation to humanity. In this way Christianity has a unique position and can be the only “authentic response” to God. As Hourani describes his position, “All other responses, all religious systems, are merely human constructions…They are not alternative paths to God.”[17] In fact, any non-Christian religious system, including Islam, of which Kraemer had a profound understanding, is described by Kraemer as sinful, an artificial attempt to be like God and in this way, a repetition of the Fall.
The boldness of Kraemer’s position is intensified when set in its historical context. By the time of the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, the Protestant mission movement was experiencing the height of its development. Missionary fervor had been expanding globally and an underlying theme of the conference members, including Hendrik Kraemer, was: “The evangelization of the world in this generation.”[18] However, after World War I (1914-1918) this optimism gave way to what Sanneh describes as a “loss of Christian self-confidence” due to a crisis about the relevance of the gospel; “If evangelized, Christian countries of Europe could make war on each other, then what was the use of evangelizing non-Western societies?”[19] This crisis tempered the intensity and scale of the church’s missionary interests, and the notion of religious pluralism gained credence. By the time of the third international missionary conference at Tambaram in 1938, Kraemer’s “intolerant exclusivism” was radically at odds with the general tone of the church. His book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World was written, at least in part, in response to W.E. Hocking’s book Rethinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years, which assumed a “relationship of continuity” between Christianity and the rest of the world’s religions[20].
Kraemer called for a “divine realism” which takes “man and God radically seriously” recognizing God as the center of reality and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ as the only solution to the “radical rejection and condemnation of man” which was wrought by his corruption in sin.[21] He argued for a Christocentric view of religion which sees Christ as the standard of reference for evaluating a religion. Contrary to Hocking’s position, this view sets Christianity apart, in discontinuity with the religions of the world.
While elements of Kraemer’s position are often murky and open to criticism on the basis of his narrowly defined exclusivism, Hourani writes that in his writing “there is a certain compassionate understanding of the fragile human achievements of Muslims”[22]. Kraemer saw the value of other religions as limited to their contributions to social virtue, order, and art, but he could hardly be described as “triumphalistic” in his attitude toward Muslims.
Another scholar who went to some lengths to defend Kraemer’s position while it was not popular to do so was Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin, whose own theology in this area may be even more coherent and influential, writes of Kraemer that:
“If we are speaking about religious ideas, or about religious experiences, then certainly to claim uniqueness and finality for one’s own is intolerable arrogance. Kraemer’s whole point is that we are not; we are talking about facts of history. If, in fact, it is true that almighty God…so humbled himself as to become a part of our sinful humanity and to suffer and die a shameful death to take away our sin and rise from the dead…if this is a fact, then to affirm it is not arrogance. To remain quiet about it is treason to our fellow human beings.”[23]
Newbigin also insisted on God’s unique revelation in Christ as well as “the obligation to proclaim that in mission and service.”[24] These convictions led Newbigin to address what he saw as the challenge of religious pluralism. Newbigin took seriously the calls for cultural sensitivity and tolerance. The increasing awareness in the West of other cultures and faiths seemed to make it increasingly difficult to affirm the uniqueness of Christianity, let alone the obligation to convert people of other faiths. These circumstances served to underscore the urgency with which Newbigin defended Christian particularity and the call to mission.
Despite his sympathetic stance to such criticism, Newbigin maintained that humans are all in a search for truth and this did not mean that “all roads led to the peak of the same mountain. Some were false short cuts, and even if they did not lead over the precipice, they left us self-centeredly entangled in muddy fields.”[25] Newbigin’s warning about religious pluralism, then, was that it “could not exclude claims of absolute uniqueness lest we became totally imprisoned in subjective relativism.” He warned against using truth claims as a means for asserting personal advantage as if to “produce the sacrosanct truth of the infallibility of revolutionary relativism and smash your way to victory by gutting truth claims, any or all of them.”[26]
Although the concern to avoid a harmful triumphalism was legitimate in his view, sacrificing truth claims was not the solution. He pointed out the reality that relativism could be just as triumphalistic as exclusivism and described an attack on truth claims as expedient, perhaps, but not worthy of the gospel since that kind of “ideological pragmatism” could not provide hope and trust to the world.
Newbigin also described the self-defeating nature of relativism. Making a normative claim about the lack of absolute truth stands on the very thing it denies. One cannot avoid appealing to truth in the form of generalizations.
Similarly, claiming that all religions have impartial access to God in order to prove that Christians should reject exclusivism is itself circular. The person making such an accusation must also have imperfect access to this kind of truth, which begs the question, on what authority can such a person claim to have enough objectivity to make that generalization?[27]
He argued that in order to honor other religions we need a “standard of honor” such as a Christian finds in the Bible. “If we want to find norms of tolerance and open-mindedness we could do worse than go to the generalizations that faith communities characteristically make, rather than going outside those communities in a bid for risk-free knowledge,” which is only an illusion. Christian truth claims provide a standard and a motivation to honor others. It is when our actions are motivated by a desire to glorify God as an expression of love for him that we are most able to love our neighbor as one who is made in the image of God. He argued that a “confessional stance” as Sanneh describes it, “a commitment to what is worthy of God and of honoring the neighbor”, is inescapable for religious communities.[28] Religious pluralism cannot provide this standard, this confessional stance.
With regard to cultural relativism, Newbigin revealed the logical flaw of assuming a “subjective retreat… that avoids the arrogance of imposing our views on others”. Since such a retreat was impossible, and humans could only evaluate other cultures in terms of their own, Newbigin wrote that “To affirm the unique decisiveness of God’s action in Jesus Christ is not arrogance; it is the enduring bulwark against the arrogance of every culture to be itself the criterion by which others are judged.” [29]
Newbigin would offer no definitive answer to the question of whether the non-Christian could be saved and go to heaven. He saw the question as flawed and any definitive answer as arrogant since it could only be answered by God, ultimately. Such a question also drew attention away from God’s glory as the focus of the Christian life and of Christian mission.[30] It could not be affirmed, for example, that everyone who did not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was lost.
Newbigin, then, could not affirm a total discontinuity between Christianity and other religions (the very thing that Kraemer had argued against) because the gospel was to be presented to the non-Christian with his own experience as the starting point. In this way exclusivism gave way to the acknowledgement of common ground, even in Newbigin’s system. Also unlike Kraemer, Newbigin was therefore “free to explore human religiosity in both its historical and intellectual expression.”[31] He explored and appreciated the richness of cultural settings for the diversity of Christian expression they could offer and advocated an appreciation and concern for our shared human commitment with non-Christians as the foundation for dialogue. For Newbigin, “The Christian responsibility in dialogue was to tell the story of Jesus, the story of the Bible, as the power of God for salvation.”
Religious pluralism and the retreat from Christian uniqueness as preconditions for Muslim-Christian dialogue are religiously and philosophically problematic, as well as ultimately counter-productive. With the compelling examples of Hendrik Kraemer, and especially of Lesslie Newbigin, it is clear that the slogan, “I’m right, you’re wrong, go to hell” does not need to characterize a position which retains a positive view of Christian uniqueness. However, “we have in common at least the fact that we make distinctive claims, enough so that the names we bear mean something personally and historically.”[32] Dialogue which insists on preserving our distinctive religious claims may be more difficult. Awkward tension and mutual offense may even be inevitable, but dialogue on this basis is ultimately likely to engender more trust and sincerity and be taken more seriously; and in it we may model a way for the world’s Christians and Muslims to be with one another. There is indeed a way for Christians to relate to Muslims that does not sacrifice the integrity of Christian claims, that appreciates the dignity and value of Muslims, and that reflects the truth and love that the gospel demands of us.
Bibliography
Hourani, Albert. “Western Attitudes Towards Islam”. The Tenth Montefiore Memorial Lecture. University of Southampton, 1974.
Lewis, Bernard. “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go to Hell”. Atlantic Monthly. (May 2003).
Plantinga, Alvin. “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism”. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. ed. Louis Pojman. (Belmont, Wadsworth, 2003).
Plantinga, Richard. “Missionary Thinking at Tambaram.” The Changing Face of Christianity. ed. Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Sanneh, Lamin. “Between East and West: Confrontation and Encounter”. The Christian Century. (November 13, 1991).
Sanneh, Lamin. “Should Christianity be Missionary? An Appraisal and an Agenda”. dialog: A Journal of Theology. (Vol. 40, Number 2, Summer 2001).
[1] Lamin Sanneh, “Between East and West: Confrontation and Encounter”, The Christian Century, November 13, 1991, 55.
[2] Albert Hourani, “Western Attitudes Towards Islam”, The Tenth Montefiore Memorial Lecture, University of Southampton, 1974,
[3] Hourani, 8.
[4] Bernard Lewis, “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go to Hell”, Atlantic Monthly, May 2003.
[5] Lewis, “I’m Right…”
[6] Hourani, 17.
[7] Hourani, 17.
[8] Hourani, 4.
[9] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 156.
[10] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 156.
[11] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 158.
[12] Alvin Plantinga, “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism”, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, ed. Louis Pojman, (Belmont, Wadsworth, 2003), 511.
[13] Hourani, 18.
[14] Hourani, 19.
[15]Quoted in Hourani, 18.
[16] Hourani, 19.
[17] Quoted in Hourani, 18
[18] Richard Plantinga, “Missionary Thinking at Tambaram,” The Changing Face of Christianity, ed. Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 161.
[19] Lamin Sanneh, “Should Christianity be Missionary? An Appraisal and an Agenda”, dialog: A Journal of Theology, Vol. 40, Number 2, Summer 2001.
[20] Richard Plantinga, 163.
[21] Quoted in Richard Plantinga, 164.
[22] Hourani, 18.
[23]Quoted in Richard Plantinga, 175.
[24] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 93.
[25] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 93.
[26] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 93.
[27] Sanneh, “Should Chritianity, 94.
[28] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 94.
[29] Quoted in Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 95.
[30] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 95..
[31] Sanneh, “Should Christianity, 95.
[32] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 156.
The impulse to downplay or retreat from distinctive religious claims and unique religious identity, which Lamin Sanneh identifies as “particularity”, is predominantly a Western Christian phenomenon. This is perhaps not surprising given the historic interest that Christians have had in studying and interacting with Islam and Muslims compared to the relative lack of interest on the part of Muslims to understand and interact with Christianity. Albert Hourani, a Muslim scholar, confirms this tendency: “To the modern interest of some Christians in Muslim doctrine, there corresponds very little Muslim interest in Christian doctrine.”[2]
Perhaps for reasons historic and philosophical, this Christian interest in coming to terms with Muslim doctrine has been accompanied by a concern for dialogue and often an over-eagerness to avoid or abandon matters of Christian doctrine which might be of offense to Muslims. Interestingly, Hourani sees the lack of Muslim interest in Christianity as the result of Islam’s assurance that its conception of God is the only one that is tenable. He seems to take for granted that this type of confidence can only translate into a disregard for other religions, but there is no argument to this effect. In fact, what is also left unsaid is the implicit notion that it must be Christianity’s contrary tendency, i.e., not to be “sure that theirs is the only tenable doctrine of the nature of God and the ways in which He acts in the world,”[3] that has resulted in its ability to generate genuine interest in understanding Islam. But what evidence is there to make such a connection?
Bernard Lewis seems to make a similar assumption in his provocatively titled article, “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go to Hell”.[4] He categorizes religion very broadly into either triumphalism, characterized by its conviction that either Islam or Christianity is the true religion and an accompanying invitation for everyone else to go to Hell, or relativism, which holds that “I have my god, you have your god, and others have theirs.”[5] Lewis seems to leave no room for a Muslim or Christian to preserve the distinctive truth claims of his or her religion without falling into the camp of the triumphalists. It seems that he has not imagined the possibility of Muslims or Christians who do hold to the orthodox notion of Islam and Christianity as mutually exclusive and who also take initiatives to peacefully coexist and engage in fruitful dialogue with each other. Lewis blames the history of conflict between Muslims and Christians on what he sees as the predominant trend of triumphalism, thus suggesting that the hope for peaceful resolution is to be found in relativism, which he implies could be the result of “future understanding” of the similarities between Islam and Christianity. He agrees that it is on the Christian side that what he calls triumphalism is “increasingly under attack”, giving way to relativism, while “there is little sign as yet of a parallel development in Islam.” But is there good reason to believe that dissolving the unique claims of Christianity into relativism offers this kind of hope, or that we should adopt this kind of approach even if it could resolve historic conflicts?
In the article mentioned above, Albert Hourani insightfully describes categories of Western attitudes toward Islam. The first centers around Kant’s “distinction between the one true religion and the different systems of though through which men have tried to express it.”[6] In this view, Islam and Christianity are both imperfect expressions of the one transcendent reality. If this is an accurate description, then we are to conclude either that all religions (including Islam and Christianity) are basically the same, which highlights the need for tolerance, or that each religion reveals true values which are less evident in others, which highlights the need for dialogue. He offers Wilfred Cantwell Smith as an example of this approach. Cantwell Smith concedes that the Bible is the Word of God only in the same sense that the Qur’an can be called the Word of God, that is, because “it is a word through which men have come to know God.”[7]
From his introduction, however, it seems that Hourani would also share some aspects of this position. He writes that “…just as Christianity is unique for a Christian, there are other senses in which it should be regarded as one among several manifestations of the human spirit, one member of a class – the class of all religions…and one religion can be used to throw light on another.”[8]
As Lamin Sanneh points out, however, these types of approach, as expressed by Albert Hourani and Bernard Lewis as well as by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, raise many questions and criticisms. Sanneh calls attention to the “species of Protestant skepticism that says our own religion does not matter while that of others does.” The apparent tendency is that Christians are tempted to “give away” foundational aspects of Christianity which highlight its uniqueness in order to mitigate the sense of competing claims as a way to engender trust and promote dialogue.
Something similar to the thought that Christianity and Islam are equally imperfect expressions of reality underlies these impulses. Sanneh’s observation, however, is that if this is the case and the nature of dialogue is to “increase our grasp of the Reality of which we have only partial, imperfect glimpses in our own religion” then “we are left with a melting-pot solution to religious differences.”[9] As Sanneh’s comment suggests, this approach betrays a reductive, utilitarian view of religion in which the ultimate goal is for humanity to acquire the right information about “Reality” or to adopt the right kind of morality. Religion is reduced to intellectual insight or moral improvement, which is contrary to the historic teachings of both Islam and Christianity.
Such a philosophical presupposition raises the question of the necessity for dialogue. If a determination has already been made, discounting the distinctive claims of Islam and Christianity (or any other religion), then dialogue seems to be a futile effort. Those who share this presupposition might be seen as doing nothing more than patting each other on the back in dialogue, congratulating one another for agreeing with, or benefiting from, the pre-established conclusion. He argues that worthwhile Christian dialogue should recognize, rather than rescind, particularity. He makes a distinction between particularity, as the distinctiveness of a religion’s claims, and particularism, as the conviction that one’s own distinct claims are the only true ones.
Another criticism raised by an insistence on this type of pluralism as a precondition for dialogue is that it begs the question as to which beliefs and teachings of each religion are to be adopted or rejected. Where would the criteria for making that kind of determination come from? It would obviously have to come from outside either religion, setting up some other standard as the arbiter of divine revelation in an effort to see the religions as equal. But on what basis could such criteria be said to be authoritative? If, as Bernard Lewis suggests, we are to prefer relativism to triumphalism, on what basis should those whom he would describe as triumphalists abandon their convictions in order to become relativists?
Similarly, Sanneh asks, “If we use Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist objections to rescind Christian particularity how is that better or worse than using Christian objections to wreak similar havoc with Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist particularity?”[10] This highlights a serious problem with this type of pluralism as a presupposition for dialogue. If religious pluralism is to be adopted in light of the multiplicity of religious faiths with sincere believers making mutually contradictory claims, then the effect is to invalidate the distinctive claims of Islam as well as Christianity.
It is not difficult to understand why Muslims would not find such an approach endearing. It is more likely, in fact, that Muslims would be surprised by the relativistic implication that Islam is not “valid for them or anybody else.”[11] It is seems unlikely that what appears to be an eagerness to minimize or abandon unique Christian doctrines could engender trust on the part of Muslims. If we are so recklessly dismissive about our own faith, Muslims who do honor the distinctive claims of their religion will have little incentive to identify with us or trust us in religious matters.
In the West, however, it is often accepted as axiomatic that religion is a purely individual matter. Christianity is reduced to “choice and option”, so the religious cost of pluralism is hardly felt in comparison to the alternative, a burden of guilt associated with taking the unique claims of Christianity seriously. It is assumed that holding to the unique truth of Christian claims betrays some arrogance or religious imperialism. But such a charge is self-defeating. As Sanneh asks, “Have we in fact abandoned the one-sidedness we condemn in others when we proceed to make our own formulations – or those of Muslims or others – normative for all religions?” In other words, if we accuse particularist claims of being inherently arrogant or “one-sided” we take on an argument which Alvin Plantinga describes as a “philosophical tar baby”[12], since any claim about religions, including the claim that all religions are equally valid, excludes all opposing positions and is subject to the same accusation of arrogance. A Christian or a Muslim might ask why he or she should accept an exclusive claim made by a liberal theologian over the exclusive claims already present in Christianity and Islam as revealed in their scriptures.
Pragmatically, if the impulse to concede Christian convictions arises, at least in part, from a desire to establish common ground with Muslims and improve our relationships with them, then we ought to look for evidence that such a strategy is or has been successful. Much to the contrary, however, as Sanneh points out, “Just at the time when the liberal West is prepared, rightly or wrongly, to abandon all matters of religious offense to Muslims…Muslims hold tenaciously to a view of the perfidious West”. It seems quite legitimate to ask if there is some support in the history of Muslim Christian encounter for the notion that a pluralistic view of religion will have a salutary impact on that relationship. But the call for dialogue, accompanied by the call for a “rejection of Christian uniqueness”, has been present for at least a generation, and has also coincided with “a deafening Muslim chorus proclaiming the West as a religious antagonist”, suggesting, perhaps, that the approach of the liberal West is ineffective at best.
Bearing in mind, however, that a majority of Muslims and Christians do not live in the West and will not share the religious pluralism of Immanuel Kant or Wilfred Cantwell Smith, it should also be questioned in what way dialogue on this basis will represent their concerns. It seems evident that one of the most significant values of Muslim-Christian dialogue is that it can serve as a model for how everyday Muslims and Christians can relate to one another. However, if we maintain the presupposition that real conversation and engagement can’t occur unless we concede certain distinctive religious claims or adopt a position of religious pluralism in general, we alienate the majority of the world’s Muslims and Christians from dialogue. And to the extent that the non-Western world is impacted by religious developments in the West, we effectively communicate the undesirable message that dialogue between Muslims and Christians, as they actually are in their mainstream expressions worldwide, is impossible. If we are looking to achieve the greatest global benefit from Muslim-Christian dialogue, therefore, it seems that we would be well-served to abandon hope that the rest of the world will adopt religious pluralism and instead focus our energies on modeling a way for Muslims and Christians to engage in fruitful conversation while honoring their respective religious particularity. After all, it is the Muslims and Christians who hold the most exclusivistic positions with regard to each other who stand to benefit most from learning a way to dialogue.
Returning to Hourani’s categories of Western attitudes towards Islam, and to take Hourani’s categories out of order, his third approach is the view that “Islam, like other religions outside Christianity, can be seen, so to speak, as stopping places on the road to the Church.”[13] This position allows for non-Christian religions such as Islam to be “accidental” sources of truth and inspiration for their followers, while maintaining that Christianity is somehow the “ultimate meeting-point of all faiths”.[14] By emphasizing areas of commonality between Islam and Christianity, this approach attempts to “make possible cooperation in the natural order”.[15]
This position is represented by Robin Zaehner, who accepts Muhammad as a prophet, since “there is no criterion by which the gift of prophecy can be withheld from him unless it is withheld from the Hebrew prophets also.”[16] According to Zaehner, when understood correctly, there is also no contradiction between the Qur’an and the New Testament. In fact, he tries to read Christian interpretations into Qur’anic passages. While this position attempts to preserve a unique place for Christianity, it does so at the cost of both Christian and Muslim uniqueness. Muhammad is included as a prophet, which seems to secularize the notion of prophecy. It can hardly be the same voice speaking in such contradictory messages through Jesus and Muhammad, for example, especially in the Muslim view of revelation as the dictated speech of God. And the Qur’an is interpreted in a Christian light, which seems to completely discount the history of Qur’anic interpretation by Muslims themselves.
The second approach Hourani outlines is represented by Hendrik Kraemer. Kraemer, as Cantwell Smith, was also brought up in the Calvinist tradition, but comes to very different conclusions with regard to Christianity’s relationship to Islam. Kraemer points to the Incarnation as the unique, definitive moment of God’s revelation to humanity. In this way Christianity has a unique position and can be the only “authentic response” to God. As Hourani describes his position, “All other responses, all religious systems, are merely human constructions…They are not alternative paths to God.”[17] In fact, any non-Christian religious system, including Islam, of which Kraemer had a profound understanding, is described by Kraemer as sinful, an artificial attempt to be like God and in this way, a repetition of the Fall.
The boldness of Kraemer’s position is intensified when set in its historical context. By the time of the international missionary conference in Edinburgh in 1910, the Protestant mission movement was experiencing the height of its development. Missionary fervor had been expanding globally and an underlying theme of the conference members, including Hendrik Kraemer, was: “The evangelization of the world in this generation.”[18] However, after World War I (1914-1918) this optimism gave way to what Sanneh describes as a “loss of Christian self-confidence” due to a crisis about the relevance of the gospel; “If evangelized, Christian countries of Europe could make war on each other, then what was the use of evangelizing non-Western societies?”[19] This crisis tempered the intensity and scale of the church’s missionary interests, and the notion of religious pluralism gained credence. By the time of the third international missionary conference at Tambaram in 1938, Kraemer’s “intolerant exclusivism” was radically at odds with the general tone of the church. His book, The Christian Message in a Non-Christian World was written, at least in part, in response to W.E. Hocking’s book Rethinking Missions: A Laymen’s Inquiry after One Hundred Years, which assumed a “relationship of continuity” between Christianity and the rest of the world’s religions[20].
Kraemer called for a “divine realism” which takes “man and God radically seriously” recognizing God as the center of reality and salvation through faith in Jesus Christ as the only solution to the “radical rejection and condemnation of man” which was wrought by his corruption in sin.[21] He argued for a Christocentric view of religion which sees Christ as the standard of reference for evaluating a religion. Contrary to Hocking’s position, this view sets Christianity apart, in discontinuity with the religions of the world.
While elements of Kraemer’s position are often murky and open to criticism on the basis of his narrowly defined exclusivism, Hourani writes that in his writing “there is a certain compassionate understanding of the fragile human achievements of Muslims”[22]. Kraemer saw the value of other religions as limited to their contributions to social virtue, order, and art, but he could hardly be described as “triumphalistic” in his attitude toward Muslims.
Another scholar who went to some lengths to defend Kraemer’s position while it was not popular to do so was Lesslie Newbigin. Newbigin, whose own theology in this area may be even more coherent and influential, writes of Kraemer that:
“If we are speaking about religious ideas, or about religious experiences, then certainly to claim uniqueness and finality for one’s own is intolerable arrogance. Kraemer’s whole point is that we are not; we are talking about facts of history. If, in fact, it is true that almighty God…so humbled himself as to become a part of our sinful humanity and to suffer and die a shameful death to take away our sin and rise from the dead…if this is a fact, then to affirm it is not arrogance. To remain quiet about it is treason to our fellow human beings.”[23]
Newbigin also insisted on God’s unique revelation in Christ as well as “the obligation to proclaim that in mission and service.”[24] These convictions led Newbigin to address what he saw as the challenge of religious pluralism. Newbigin took seriously the calls for cultural sensitivity and tolerance. The increasing awareness in the West of other cultures and faiths seemed to make it increasingly difficult to affirm the uniqueness of Christianity, let alone the obligation to convert people of other faiths. These circumstances served to underscore the urgency with which Newbigin defended Christian particularity and the call to mission.
Despite his sympathetic stance to such criticism, Newbigin maintained that humans are all in a search for truth and this did not mean that “all roads led to the peak of the same mountain. Some were false short cuts, and even if they did not lead over the precipice, they left us self-centeredly entangled in muddy fields.”[25] Newbigin’s warning about religious pluralism, then, was that it “could not exclude claims of absolute uniqueness lest we became totally imprisoned in subjective relativism.” He warned against using truth claims as a means for asserting personal advantage as if to “produce the sacrosanct truth of the infallibility of revolutionary relativism and smash your way to victory by gutting truth claims, any or all of them.”[26]
Although the concern to avoid a harmful triumphalism was legitimate in his view, sacrificing truth claims was not the solution. He pointed out the reality that relativism could be just as triumphalistic as exclusivism and described an attack on truth claims as expedient, perhaps, but not worthy of the gospel since that kind of “ideological pragmatism” could not provide hope and trust to the world.
Newbigin also described the self-defeating nature of relativism. Making a normative claim about the lack of absolute truth stands on the very thing it denies. One cannot avoid appealing to truth in the form of generalizations.
Similarly, claiming that all religions have impartial access to God in order to prove that Christians should reject exclusivism is itself circular. The person making such an accusation must also have imperfect access to this kind of truth, which begs the question, on what authority can such a person claim to have enough objectivity to make that generalization?[27]
He argued that in order to honor other religions we need a “standard of honor” such as a Christian finds in the Bible. “If we want to find norms of tolerance and open-mindedness we could do worse than go to the generalizations that faith communities characteristically make, rather than going outside those communities in a bid for risk-free knowledge,” which is only an illusion. Christian truth claims provide a standard and a motivation to honor others. It is when our actions are motivated by a desire to glorify God as an expression of love for him that we are most able to love our neighbor as one who is made in the image of God. He argued that a “confessional stance” as Sanneh describes it, “a commitment to what is worthy of God and of honoring the neighbor”, is inescapable for religious communities.[28] Religious pluralism cannot provide this standard, this confessional stance.
With regard to cultural relativism, Newbigin revealed the logical flaw of assuming a “subjective retreat… that avoids the arrogance of imposing our views on others”. Since such a retreat was impossible, and humans could only evaluate other cultures in terms of their own, Newbigin wrote that “To affirm the unique decisiveness of God’s action in Jesus Christ is not arrogance; it is the enduring bulwark against the arrogance of every culture to be itself the criterion by which others are judged.” [29]
Newbigin would offer no definitive answer to the question of whether the non-Christian could be saved and go to heaven. He saw the question as flawed and any definitive answer as arrogant since it could only be answered by God, ultimately. Such a question also drew attention away from God’s glory as the focus of the Christian life and of Christian mission.[30] It could not be affirmed, for example, that everyone who did not accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior was lost.
Newbigin, then, could not affirm a total discontinuity between Christianity and other religions (the very thing that Kraemer had argued against) because the gospel was to be presented to the non-Christian with his own experience as the starting point. In this way exclusivism gave way to the acknowledgement of common ground, even in Newbigin’s system. Also unlike Kraemer, Newbigin was therefore “free to explore human religiosity in both its historical and intellectual expression.”[31] He explored and appreciated the richness of cultural settings for the diversity of Christian expression they could offer and advocated an appreciation and concern for our shared human commitment with non-Christians as the foundation for dialogue. For Newbigin, “The Christian responsibility in dialogue was to tell the story of Jesus, the story of the Bible, as the power of God for salvation.”
Religious pluralism and the retreat from Christian uniqueness as preconditions for Muslim-Christian dialogue are religiously and philosophically problematic, as well as ultimately counter-productive. With the compelling examples of Hendrik Kraemer, and especially of Lesslie Newbigin, it is clear that the slogan, “I’m right, you’re wrong, go to hell” does not need to characterize a position which retains a positive view of Christian uniqueness. However, “we have in common at least the fact that we make distinctive claims, enough so that the names we bear mean something personally and historically.”[32] Dialogue which insists on preserving our distinctive religious claims may be more difficult. Awkward tension and mutual offense may even be inevitable, but dialogue on this basis is ultimately likely to engender more trust and sincerity and be taken more seriously; and in it we may model a way for the world’s Christians and Muslims to be with one another. There is indeed a way for Christians to relate to Muslims that does not sacrifice the integrity of Christian claims, that appreciates the dignity and value of Muslims, and that reflects the truth and love that the gospel demands of us.
Bibliography
Hourani, Albert. “Western Attitudes Towards Islam”. The Tenth Montefiore Memorial Lecture. University of Southampton, 1974.
Lewis, Bernard. “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go to Hell”. Atlantic Monthly. (May 2003).
Plantinga, Alvin. “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism”. Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology. ed. Louis Pojman. (Belmont, Wadsworth, 2003).
Plantinga, Richard. “Missionary Thinking at Tambaram.” The Changing Face of Christianity. ed. Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Sanneh, Lamin. “Between East and West: Confrontation and Encounter”. The Christian Century. (November 13, 1991).
Sanneh, Lamin. “Should Christianity be Missionary? An Appraisal and an Agenda”. dialog: A Journal of Theology. (Vol. 40, Number 2, Summer 2001).
[1] Lamin Sanneh, “Between East and West: Confrontation and Encounter”, The Christian Century, November 13, 1991, 55.
[2] Albert Hourani, “Western Attitudes Towards Islam”, The Tenth Montefiore Memorial Lecture, University of Southampton, 1974,
[3] Hourani, 8.
[4] Bernard Lewis, “I’m Right, You’re Wrong, Go to Hell”, Atlantic Monthly, May 2003.
[5] Lewis, “I’m Right…”
[6] Hourani, 17.
[7] Hourani, 17.
[8] Hourani, 4.
[9] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 156.
[10] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 156.
[11] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 158.
[12] Alvin Plantinga, “A Defense of Religious Exclusivism”, Philosophy of Religion: An Anthology, ed. Louis Pojman, (Belmont, Wadsworth, 2003), 511.
[13] Hourani, 18.
[14] Hourani, 19.
[15]Quoted in Hourani, 18.
[16] Hourani, 19.
[17] Quoted in Hourani, 18
[18] Richard Plantinga, “Missionary Thinking at Tambaram,” The Changing Face of Christianity, ed. Lamin Sanneh and Joel A. Carpenter. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 161.
[19] Lamin Sanneh, “Should Christianity be Missionary? An Appraisal and an Agenda”, dialog: A Journal of Theology, Vol. 40, Number 2, Summer 2001.
[20] Richard Plantinga, 163.
[21] Quoted in Richard Plantinga, 164.
[22] Hourani, 18.
[23]Quoted in Richard Plantinga, 175.
[24] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 93.
[25] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 93.
[26] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 93.
[27] Sanneh, “Should Chritianity, 94.
[28] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 94.
[29] Quoted in Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 95.
[30] Sanneh, “Should Christianity”, 95..
[31] Sanneh, “Should Christianity, 95.
[32] Sanneh, “Between East and West”, 156.
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