Christian Responses to the Political Challenge of Islam

Abstract

The article provides an overview of the political dimension of Islam, drawing attention to the traditional understanding of Islam's fusion of the political and the religious. An assessment of both the historical roots of Islam and more contemporary Islam political theologies makes manifest the problematic and variegated nature of this assumption. The contemporary responses to Islam in the public square of three Christian theologians are then analysed in the light of the evident diversity of political Islam: Kenneth Cragg, Pope Benedict XVI, and Rowan Williams, drawing them into conversation with Oliver O'Donovan and John Milbank. They each offer complementary insights into theologies of the Church, the common good, Christian culture, sin, notions of power and the doctrine of God. This analysis highlights the need for a Christian political theology that can engage with Islam in all its diversity and yet challenge elements of Islamic voluntarism that are inhibitive of religious plurality.

Keywords:

• Islam
• politics
• Shariʿa
• Christianity
• law

Notes

While Muhammad's vocation carried a divine sanction and thus impacted the legal and societal order framed around him, it would become clear after his death that there was a real question about the theoretical and practical sustainability of a complete coherence between law and religion in Islam.

Elsewhere, Brague (2007, 121) notes the entanglements that both Christianity and Islam had with empire: “Christianity because it inherited one, and Islam because it gained one by conquest.”

Crucially, for Christians, accounts of Jesus in the Qur'an deny his crucifixion; see Q 4.157.

Donner uses this description because the “Constitution” established guidelines for collaboration between various tribes in Medina rather than being a comprehensive, political treatise.

See especially Mawdudi, 1955. Here, the Shariʿa of Islam is a sufficient basis for a modern constitution and authority is vested in the people as a whole, not in a single caliph or imam

See Brague (2007, 81), who refers to the “overabundance of legitimacy that it made available” creating the conundrum of deciding “who was the beneficiary of that legitimacy.”

See Scott (2010) for an analysis of the diversity of Islamist approaches within contemporary Egypt.

See also Pankhurst (2010), who compares the arguments for an Islamic state with those for an Islamic vision of democratic participation. According to Reza, within Sunni Islam at least, the Islamic state is not necessary but nor should Muslims be obliged to shoe-horn their political vision into the framework of democratic ideals.

See Lamb (1997) for a theological account of Kenneth Cragg's legacy.

See Brown (2008) for an overview of Cragg's political theology: “Cragg believes that religious faith could and should renounce all power-complex and physical militancy without abandoning political duties” (390).

Lux Mundi was the title of a collection of essays published in 1889 by a number of liberal Catholic Anglican scholars (Gore 1909). It sought to respond to the challenges of modern biblical scholarship and found a binding theme for this task, made explicit in Gore's sub-title, in the doctrine of the incarnation. As a commemorative collection of essays some 100 years later notes (Morgan 1989, xiii), there is evident diversity within the essays of Lux Mundi and by no means does each essay seek to theorize on the doctrine of the incarnation, but there is at least a claim that “‘the Incarnation’ is constitutive of the identity of the Christian religion.” It is noteworthy that Kenneth Cragg's DPhil research on Islam in the twentieth century and the response of Christian theology to its challenge was conducted while he was Rector of Longworth, Oxford, the site of the gathering of the original Lux Mundi authors. See Cragg 1994, 50–8; see also Maeland 2010. As Maeland states, “the crux in Cragg's interreligious approaches to Islam and Judaism is located in ‘love who suffers,’ which is risked in all its divine vulnerability as causd by ‘real evil’” (258). See also Brown (2008, 376), “it is clear that the Lux Mundi essay by Charles Gore on the doctrine of Kenosis…played a considerable part in his theological understanding. This concept, which incorporated the suffering of the Spirit within humanity recurs in Cragg's thinking through many of his books.”

See O'Donovan 1996, 82–119. The “doctrine of the two” refers to the high tradition of political theology epitomized by St Augustine, which asserts the presence of two kingdoms of social rule to which God's people are simultaneously called to account: the kingdom of God's rule of love and that of the “secular,” founded on coercion. These realms are separate yet overlapping, the challenge of political theology being one of discerning the implications of the eschatological fulfilment of God's rule for the temporal rule of the secular: “Proclaiming the unity of God's rule in Christ is the task of Christian witness; understanding the duality is the chief assistance rendered by Christian reflection” (82).

From a critical review of The Call of the Minaret by the Pakistani scholar Hamidullah, quoted in Lamb 1997, 86.

This idea is a consistent theme throughout Kenneth Cragg's writings but is given particular attention in his The Privilege of Man (1968b); see especially Chapter 2: “‘God is, and Man is His Caliph’: A Quranic View” (51–75); and A Certain Sympathy of Scriptures (2004).

See Brague 2007, 79, for a view that disputes Cragg's interpretation of khilāfa.

See Lamb 1997, 123–149, for a summary of objections to Cragg's writings, especially from Islamic critics. For Hamidullah, Cragg offers a “sugar-coated pill” (123).

“Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” For the full text of the lecture, see Benedict XVI. 2006.

See O'Mahony 2009 for an outline of papal attitudes to the “Idea of Europe” over the last two centuries.

See also the 2005 lecture, “Europe's Crisis of Culture” (Benedict XVI 2005), where he outlines similar arguments for the logos of the Christian faith, its rationality, in the face of a “Godless Society” and a “Culture of Rights” that would herald the disappearance of human dignity.

A parallel argument has been presented by the former Financial Times journalist Christopher Caldwell (2009), in his defence of a “rational Islamophobia” that would protect Europe's Christian heritage from the erosion of illiberal Muslims and a naïve and self-deceiving European political class. See Laitin 2010, for a sociological critique of “rational Islamophobia.”

See Schmitt's classic work, The Concept of the Political (2007).

Arguably, Strong did not need to speculate. When one reads Schmitt's (2007, 29) remark: “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to a Christian to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks. The enemy in the political sense need not be hated personally, and in the private sphere only does it make sense to love one's enemy, ie, one's adversary,” the clear implication is that Europe's “enemy” is Islam, Europe being “Christian”, and that recognizing this fact in cultural and political terms does not contradict the commandment to love the individual Muslim.

Speaking of Islam, Wyclif, in his De Fide Catholica, wrote, “I am bold to say that this antireligion will grow until the clergy return to the poverty of Jesus Christ, and to its original state” (quoted in Gaudeul, 2000, 156).

A Victorian civil servant in India who wrote in a bestselling Life of Mohamet (1858–1861): “the sword of Mahomet, and the Coran are the most fatal enemies of Civilization, Liberty and the Truth which the world has yet known” (quoted in Ansari 2004, 61).

See Chapman 2011 for a summary account of Rowan Williams' “interactive pluralism” and indebtedness to Neville Figgis.

Rowland (2008, 28) compares the Augustinianism of Milbank's “Radical Orthodoxy” school with Pope Benedict's political theology, noting the influence of Rowan Williams on the former. As Rowland points out, though, the converging political theologies of Milbank and Pope Benedict produce very different anthropologies and ecclesiologies. The adjective, “Augustinian,” is elsewhere helpfully described by Rowland (2003, 6) as a “theology of grace associated with the Nouvelle Théologie scholars” and an interest in “the relationship between the secular and sacral orders, the role of memory in the formation of the soul and the importance of a narrative tradition for intellectual and spiritual development.” Uniting the Augustinianism of Archbishop Rowan Williams, John Milbank and Pope Benedict is, I would argue, an “ecclesial-turn” that asserts that the Church “should not be policed or determined by some external discourse” (Bretherton 2008, 269).

By contrast, Aidan Nichols' Augustinianism leads him to conclude that “Only if the State is also a sacred guardian of beliefs and values that are precious could” the state expect anyone to die for it (1999, 78). Williams might well respond with William Cavanaugh that the nation-state has no claim on its citizens to die for it. For Cavanaugh (2006, 320), the church is the is one, true “public square,” as the embodiment of the universal, not the state: “When the church is viewed as particular – as one of many in civil society – and the nation-state is viewed as universal – as the larger unifying reality – then it is inevitable that the one will absorb the many, in the putative interests of harmony and peace. Indeed, war becomes a means of furthering the integration of the many into the one; we must all stand together when faced with an enemy.” (see also Cavanaugh 2004). What seems to separate the Augustinianism of Williams and Cavanaugh from that of Milbank, Benedict and Nichols is a greater attention to the sinfulness of the created order.

Typical examples of Williams' concern that a Christian voice is articulated in British public life are: Williams 2002 (written after 9/11), 2010 (edited from a speech entitled “Building an Ethical Economy: Theology and the Marketplace”), and 2008b.

For John Milbank, it is a “teleological ethics” that is missing from Rowan Williams' account: what is the group goal for the whole society? In Milbank's account (2009, 275), though, only the catholic spirit can found an inclusive common good.

O'Donovan's The Desire of the Nations (1996) could be said to be his core treatise; The Ways of Judgment (2005) is then a corresponding account of the theological nature of government authority. See Bretherton 2008 for an excellent overview of O'Donovan's project.

“… an era in which the truth of Christianity was taken to be a truth of secular politics” (O'Donovan 1996, 195).

See O'Donovan's (1986, 100) account of the Reformed tradition of political theology as embodied in the origins of the Church of England.

Rowland 2003, ch. 5: “The Logos of the Kultur of Modernity.” On Benedict, specifically: “Ratzinger's interventions in the area of political theory have taken the form of exhorting liberal elites to recognize that the rule of law must itself be based on solid foundations…the logos inherent in creation.” Rowland 2008, 122).

It must be noted that this critique of Milbank does not necessitate the Reformed sensibility of O'Donovan. Hollon believes that Henri de Lubac, to whom Milbank and Benedict are both indebted, grounds a political theology on the priority of Christology over ecclesiology. It is significant that de Lubac was reacting to the “political Augustinianism” of medieval Catholicism from which O'Donovan also chooses to distance himself (Hollon 2010, 57–68).

“If Christians enter this process of push and pull on any different terms from other people, it is simply that it is of ultimately less importance to them whether they do the pulling and the pushing or get pulled and pushed” (O'Donovan 2008, 412).

It is worth noting that O'Donovan's otherwise Barthian treatise gives a rather more positive potential to monotheism than did Barth. Monotheism by itself could be used in absolute terms and become its own idolatry. Nazism had absolutized the state and, interestingly, Hitler was regarded by Barth (1957, 448–9) as “Allah's Prophet” for his day, an example of the dangers of untrammelled monotheism that was falsely objective and reductive of God's mystery.

“A good example of the absolutising of ‘uniqueness’ is provided by the noisy fanaticism of Islam regarding the one God, alongside whom, it is humorous to observe, only the baroque figure of His prophet is entitled to a place of honour. ‘Monotheism’ is obviously the esoteric mystery behind nearly all the religions with which we are familiar, as well as most of the primitive religions. ‘Monotheism’ is an idea which can be directly divined or logically and mathematically constructed without God.… For the cosmic forces in whose objectivity it is believed that the unique has been found are varied. It is only by an act of violence that one of them can be given pre-eminence over the others” (Barth 1957, 448).