Islam and their view of Christianity

Continuing our blog entries on Islam, I want to begin to look at some of the points made by Ergun and Emir Caner in their book, "Unveiling Islam" published by Kregel Publications and which you can purchase online at Barnes and Nobel or Amazon. This book was published in 2002, just a year after the 911 attacks, but as far as I can tell, its relevance and material are exactly the same today and are not tainted by the attacks when presenting an understanding of Islam. In this blog, I want to simply present two basics of the faith and then we can get into the specifics in coming entries. All my cited quotes below come from their book.

In their book, these two brothers do an excellent job of trying to explain Islam, the semantics and grammar of the faith and relationship with Christianity. Each chapter discusses an element of the Islamic faith and examines its view of Christianity from the Muslim perspective. The brothers also use quotes from the Qur'an, Hadith and Sunnah. According to Islam, the Qur’an is the "exact word-for-word copy of God's final revelation [to Muhammad]" (p. 83). The Qur'an is the highest authority of the Islamic faith. Following in importance, however, are the Hadith and Sunnah. The Hadith is "a narration of the life of the prophet [Muhammad] and what he said" (p. 95). The Sunnah is the 'moral code' of Islam. It details the life of Muhammad in terms of his ethics and lifestyle in which Muslims are commanded to follow. These three books make up the whole of the Islamic faith, strictly speaking. Factions and splinter groups, over the years, have distorted and often completely altered the truth of these tenets, however, causing much of the violence and misunderstanding of the faith today.

VERY briefly, the Qur'an teaches that a Muslim has no guarantee of entering eternity and that God can arbitrarily decide to send you to hell. Their God is a completely distant, wrathful and isolated God, who does not communicate with Muslims personally and who acts as a judge of the worthiness of a Muslim. The hope of a Muslim entering eternal life is based on the "divine balance scales" (p. 149) weighing in their favor. A Muslim believes that if they are 51% good then at their judgment before God they will enter eternal life. Unfortunately, their understanding of good and bad, right and wrong is based on the tenets of the three books mentioned above, which include commands of violence against infidels.

The ONLY way to guarantee entry into eternal life is is to die in jihad. According to the authors, jihad "strictly speaking...means a continuing holy war against them [non-believers of Islam]" (p. 185). Both the Qur'an and Hadith explicitly command jihad against infidels (especially Christians) and, most importantly, states that dying in jihad balances the scales. the Hadith says, "we took part in jihad...the deeds done by us at that time...be enough to save us from punishment in that the good deeds compensate for the bad ones" [hadith 5.58.254] (p. 191). No wonder jihad against infidels, Christians, Jews and Americans, is a common desire of Muslims.

Now that we have a tiny bit of understanding as to the sources of Islamic beliefs and how Islam views infidels, we can begin examining whether Islam is predominantly a violent faith. As always, comments are welcome. Until next time...God bless.

posted by: crossman at 20:24 | link | comments |
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