Understanding Islam

So let's start with prayer. The name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, Amen. God and Father, you will all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth. Send workers into your great harvest that the gospel may be preached to every creature and your church gathered together by the word of life and strengthened by the power of the sacraments.

We advance in the way of salvation and love, through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, forever and ever. Amen. Amen. The name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, Amen.

Alright, so welcome to the second week of the program of Catholic Studies. Love you guys all last week. And so welcome back to the second part of our series on Islam. And last week, if you remember, we went through the all-too-cursor early, went through the history of Islam, tried to provide the context for today's class where we're going to go through the doctrines and the practices of Islam.

And so for the sake of time, I'll try to stick to the task at hand and we won't be able to properly digress back into that context and into that history. So if you missed last week, I apologize for that. And maybe we can try with the Q&A at the end if we could try to fill in some of your gaps, but also we are going, I recorded last week, and we have podcasts that we're going to be putting on the website in the same spot where they put Father Newman's homilies, but we'll be having some technical difficulties all week, so they're not quite up there. But I won't stream yet.

So there's bear with it. It will be up there eventually when we figure it out. Now, now before getting into the actual, let's see if there's a few left right there. Alright, before we're actually getting into it, one thing that's important, we brought this up last week, that's important to remember that there's a tremendous goal between how many Muslims actually live and what the doctrines of Islam actually teach.

Now, like I said last week, if we think that Catholics don't know their faith, that for the most part this is nothing compared to Islam. And this is important because a critical inquiry about Islam, when we're doing so, we're not judging persons, but rather we're judging ideas. And ideas are important and should be addressed openly and critically, because as the historian Richard Weaver famously said, ideas have consequences, meaning that ideas do have lead to actions. So you can't just ignore the ideas for the sake of trying to be polite, and that's something we'll get back to later.

But anyway, I just, but that is something that's important because it is, there is a tendency always to judge, okay, because there's ideas, we deem them as wrong, because these ideas do have serious problems with them that necessarily we're going to think that every single member of the religion is necessarily a bad person, but that is not the case. Now, so I just wanted to start with that. Now, first what I want to start doing is going through sort of a bird's eye view of the basic doctrines and practices of Islam. And then we can go from that sort of general bird's eye view to talking more about more specific Islamic beliefs, and then move into the consequences of those ideas, meaning the practices that flow from them.

So we're going to do the bird's eye view of Islam, specific beliefs, and then the practices that come from those beliefs. Now, the first thing when starting with this bird's eye view is that in sharp contrast to the complex belief system of Christianity, Islam is a religion of simplicity, meaning there is no such thing really as Islamic theology. In fact, the Islamic theology can entirely be summed up into one sentence, which is called the Shahada, which is simply that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet or his messenger. And this is one of the key selling points of Islam that they've all historically used to sell the religion, and that they try to argue that Christianity is too complicated and not theological.

So just the simplicity of it, that this really is the only pure belief of Islam. And the Shahada is the first of what are called the five pillars of Islam, and these are the five basic tenets of if you want to consider yourself a Muslim, these are the five things that you have to do. Now, the pillars, like I said, they sum up the central practice of Islam, and it's important to note that in contrast to Christianity, Islam is characterized more by practices than beliefs. That strictly speaking, when Christians historically emphasize orthodoxy or right belief, Muslims have emphasized what's called orthopractic or unity of religious practice.

Like I said, there's only one basic belief, and then the rest is basically just rules of the things that you have to do, which is part of the appealing part of the simplicity of it. And so there's the five basic things you have to do if you're a Muslim. The first is you have to proclaim the Shahada, which you already talked about, you don't have to learn the phrase or the term, the way. And actually one becomes a Muslim by making that confession that there being only one God, Allah and Muhammad's prophet, it would make that confession in Arabic in a public assembly of Muslims.

That's how you actually become a Muslim. And then there's four other pillars that you have to do, this is what's called the Salat, and this is based off of the, they actually took the idea of the liturgy, the hours, Christianity of praying seven times a day, they simplified it and made it five times, they prayed five times a day, and it's a little bit complicated this year that you're supposed to do, but it's very ritualistic, even the hand motions and everything, and shouldn't go off too much because I don't have a lot of fault behind to keep doing this. But anyway, you have to pray five times a day, face a Mecca, you're supposed to fast during the month of Ramadan, and then at least once in your life you're supposed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca if you are physically and financially able to. And then the last, that's the Hajj, and then the Zakat is that all Muslims are called to give two and a half percent of their income to the poor and the needy.

Now it's also important that these, well these are the five basic pillars, kind of like in Christianity, we are in the Catholic Church, we have the basic things that every Catholic has to do to be able to consider themselves at Catholic and good standing at the church, like going to Mass of the days of obligation, etc. Those aren't, those are basically the bare minimum, and likewise Islam is the five pillars of the bare minimum, and that every Muslim in order to be a good Muslim is in fact actually called to follow every rule and example that is prescribed in the Quran as well as in the life of Muhammad, and that's something we're going to get to right now. That for the rules, like we said, for the most part is just a set of rules that you're supposed to follow, that there's two main sources that they look to for, we'll say for Islam, teaching for those rules, and just like in Christianity or the Catholic Church, we say, okay, we get our doctrines from the Bible as well as from tradition, that there's actually a similarity in Islam a little bit, and that the two places where they believe that they receive their doctrines are first of all, in the words of the Quran, which are thought to be the infallible words of Allah handed down to Muhammad through the Archangel Gabriel, and all that is prescribed in the Quran is thus to be followed, and the second place is in the life and sayings of Muhammad, which are actually that Muslims are not just strictly following the Quran also, but the life and saying of Muhammad are equally binding upon the life of a Muslim, which is very important if you remember last week when we learned about the life of Muhammad. And so anyway, there are collections of all the sayings and deeds of Muhammad that are in these giant volumes that were collected in the ninth century, and there's huge vast amounts of these sayings, and they're collected, and they're called Hadiath, or the singular is Hadiath in the plural, it's called Aadiath, but we'll just call them Hadiath, because it's similar in all, and you'll lose track if I try to go from Hadiath to Aadiath back and forth, so to say, Hadiath's even though that's wrong.

But anyway, they're from a vast amount of, sorry, a vast array of sources from early people that knew Muhammad, supposedly, etc. And like I said, if you were to take them, they fill up volumes and volumes and volumes. Now, these Hadiaths, they form sort of the basis of Islamic law, because the Quran states that Muhammad is the supreme example of conduct to be imitated, and so since they are the source by tell about the life Muhammad and the sayings of Muhammad apart from just the Quran, like I said, they're also to be followed just as much as the Quran. Now one of the big things though, is that they are huge disputes over which are the true treaties and which are the forgeries or the fakities.

In fact, there are over actually 300,000 different Hadis, and most people think that 95% at least are forgeries and the other 5% aren't. So all of the main divisions within Islam are arguments over which are the real Hadis and which are the fakities. So even, this is especially true between the Shiites and the Sunnis, which is something we'll talk more about the difference between these groups, the theological beliefs in just a minute. And, but anyways, and we're going to come back to this in a second, we'll get back to the division of, or the argument over which of the Chiuadis and which are the fake ones in just a second.

Now, historically Islam is taken all of these rules and practices that their Quran prescribes and then all of the things that are prescribed in the Hadis as well. So it's almost kind of like scripture and tradition, but their version. They take them as well. And then what they've done is they sort of take all the rules and they put them together in these law codes for every Muslim to follow.

And this is what's called Sharia law. So it's basically Sharia law trying to take all of the practices prescribed in the Quran Hadis and actually make it the law. It's kind of like if the United States, if you're a Catholic country and they were to take all the rules of Catholicism and make it the legal code. And this is part of the Islamic tradition of trying to unite the political and the religious together.

This is what we talked about last week about how Islam is traditionally a territory and religion at the same time. And there's this union of sort of church, or was a mosque in state that the idea of separating the two is completely foreign. And so anyway, however, if there's a vast dispute over which are the Chiuadis and which are the fake-a-dees, there is a vast dispute in Sharia law over which are the true rules that are prescribed and which are the fake ones. So if you've ever heard about Islam having vast amounts of infighting and having more divisions than Protestantism, it's because there is so much argument over which are the real-a-dees and therefore which are the real rules to follow and which ones are the fake rules to follow.

So traditionally these are called the schools of Islamic jurisprudence because they're the schools of, okay, one, like I said, one believes that these are the real-a-dees and they make, say that these are the laws that should be made and another says these are the real-a-dees and therefore these are the laws that should be made and the Islamic world is divided for the most part into four main schools. So I should say the Sunni world is, and the Sunnis make up 85% of all Muslims in the world. So the Sunnis have their main schools, what are called the Hanafi, the Hanbali, the Maliki, and the Shafil, and this is one of the reasons why the Muslims are always killing each other is because they believe different things and they don't like each other almost as much as they don't like Christians. And then the Shiites have their own schools and we'll get more into why that is in just a second.

Now, this is important because when one wants to look at what's considered, we'd say like Orthodox Islamic teaching as well as what's the Orthodox Islamic understanding of the crayon. So if you're wanting to know like, all right, how was the bet, how are you actually supposed to interpret versus the crayon that the best place to look in under Islamic law is you look at the teachings of these four main schools because they have over the centuries written down commentaries that are basically binding upon depending on which school you are. If you're a member of the Hanafi school, the critiques of the commentaries by the Hanafi school are sort of binding upon the interpretation of the crayon. So if you want to know how the crayon really is to be interpreted, whatever it really means, you can look at what was written by these schools.

Now, this is a little bit of a side note, but if you ever see sort of debates with modern Muslim apologists, one of the things that they try to do is they try to present sort of a softer side to Islam and one of the ways they do that is they try to downplay the history of Sharia law because Sharia law is very harsh. I mean, you just have to look at the law in places like Saudi Arabia where if you commit to Islam law, they just chop your head off of the sword because the crayon says to do so, stoning, I mean, there's very, the Sharia law is very harsh and they like to try to, Muslim apologists like to try to downplay this. And one of the ways that they do that is that they try to juxtapose Islamic mysticism that's called sufism or the harsh Sharia law. But one thing that's important to remember about this idea of sufism, Islamic mysticism is that it's, well, first of all, it's not a sect but it's rather just an aspect of Islam.

There aren't these, there's basically this group that calls themselves sufis, is just there's Muslims that practice mysticism. And however, also, this is an idea that was sort of a cross pollination of Eastern Christianity that once you try and develop a deep communion with God through prayer and meditation. Now, so like I said, sufism does not stand as a sect that somehow opposes or restrains Sharia law as many modern and Muslim apologists try to claim. And then also, sufism is always a really minor aspect of Islam that even to this day is actually people that practice it are widely persecuted across the Islamic world because overwhelmingly the idea of spiritual communion with God has not had any place within Islam.

And actually many Islamic, I guess they're not theologians, have argued that even such an idea is rather actually blasphemous. And so most people in their lives focus on the external rules, not on any idea of communion with God. And here's an interesting fact for you that on the right those are what's called ruling dervishes, and I've always heard the phrase, we're willing dervish, and I never knew what willing dervish is, but it's someone that practiced sufism and they'd use these hypnotic, ruling dance while they meditate. So there you go.

If you already knew that, then you knew more than I did. Now, before going any further, this is sort of more of a side note to anything. Because I had to fit it in somewhere and it didn't actually fit it anywhere. And that is we're going to go into the theological differences between the Sunnis and the Shiites.

That last week we learned about the how historically this division arose, and how the Shiites originally were the followers of Ali and his family, the fourth Khalif and the Sunnis were the followers of the Umayy'i family when they had that civil war. And at first they started out as a political dispute, but because remember the union of politics and religion in Islam, that over time differences of belief and practice arose as well. Now, Ali was Muhammad's closest male relative, this is something we talked about last week, and the Shiites believed that only descendants of Muhammad and his relatives could be rightful Khalifs, rightful leaders of Islam. Therefore, they didn't believe that the other Khalifs that followed in the world, the main Islamic world, were valid.

They had their own Khalifs, their own leaders that they thought were the true leaders of Islam, that they called the Amams, and they had 12 of them. Now, and all of them had descended from Muhammad. And likewise, they have their own schools of juris prudence, so when we go back into those Hadith and Sharia law, because they don't think that Hadith written by those first three Khalifs that we learned about last week of Abu Bakr, Ufman and Omar, that they were valid Hadiths because they didn't think they were valid Khalifs. But they do believe that those 12 imams that they had, that all their things and writings are valid Hadiths, and therefore is binding as the grand as well.

Now, one of the main things that they also believe is an idea called, what's called the 12 imam or the hidden imam, sometimes called the almadi. And what this idea is, is they believe that there was 12 imams, successors of Muhammad, and that the last one whose name was almadi, that Allah took him from earth and took him and put him into hiding. And the idea is they believe that at the end of time, almadi will come back actually alongside Jesus, and in order to revive the true message of Islam, and what's called the great occultation, and so they believe in the coming of the mighty, and serve their second coming. And in the meantime, well, I think that that real Khalif, the 12 imam, almadi is up in heaven with Allah, that they think that their community is led by what we're called Ayatollahs, and what they are is they are basically like the vicar of the almadi here on earth, that they speak, they have sort of this divine connection that they're able to speak for the almadi.

And this is why actually the Shiites, they have sort of a religious hierarchy, and then they have this idea of the Ayatollah as sort of the head of the Shiites, that's able to, as the vicar of the almadi, that there is sort of this loose parallel between the Catholic church, the structure, that's why sometimes people refer to them as like the Catholic Muslims, because of that. Now, it's very strange, but for some reason, amongst grass root, not loot, grass root, Sunni, the idea of the almadi coming again is actually really popular there too, and this makes actually no sense because they don't believe that the almadi was the actual leader of Islam, but they think it's some sort of like knee idea, so it's become popular evidence of the fact how little they actually know their own history and their own religion. But anyway, now, so we've gone through the bird's-eye view and of the basic beliefs and practices they have to do, we've talked about where the source is the doctrine, we've talked about the Sunnis and the Shiites, now what I want to do is start going through some of the various Islamic teachings as they are presented in the Quran and Hadith, and then affirmed by those four main schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and specifically I want to look at various places that Islamic belief corresponds with Catholicism, but also the ways in which it widely differs. Then we can look at several different Islamic practices as prescribed in the Quran and Hadith that naturally outflow from the worldview of these beliefs.

So the first topic I want to look at is a very common idea, and this is the idea of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sharing beliefs in a common heritage, and leading to sometimes being called the three great Abrahamic faiths. Now, for instance, this is something that people are always thinking, okay, well, what do the Muslims and Christians and Jews have in common? Most people think they sort of share the beliefs of the Old Testament, most people think that the Muslims actually accept the Old Testament just as much as the Christians and the Jews, and that they also have the shared respect for Abraham, and so I want to start going through these. Now, the Second Vatican Council, and as well as the Catechism of the Catholic Church, they sort of touch on this when they say that Muslims profess to hold the faith of Abraham.

Now, it's important distinction to notice that it doesn't say that Muslims do hold the faith of Abraham, it says that they profess to hold the faith of Abraham. But what exactly does this mean? The idea of holding the faith of Abraham, what they profess, and you can see this idea of them professing the hold of the faith of Abraham in the Quran. That one of the famous things is the Quran refers to the Christians, the Jews and the Muslims as the people of the book, and it to sort of separate the idea of them from the polytheists and the Hindus and all the other religions, that those monotheist ones, they call the people of the book.

Now, this is kind of a misnomer, because if you want to look at those different religions, the only ones that you could actually call the people of the book would be Muslims, and by the book I mean the Quran, not the Bible, the Jews, you could call the people of the law or the Torah, and Christians would have to call the people of the word, meaning the entirety of revealed truth, we included in the written word of the Bible, the living tradition of the church, as well as most especially in the person of Jesus Christ, the word and current. But anyway, so like I said, most Christians commonly mistakenly believe that the Jews, Muslims, and Christians equally accept the authority of the Old Testament, and so the idea that most people believe is that Islam was just basically another layer that added itself to the other two religions without going back and changing the source material. Now, if for Catholic those opening the crayons for the first time, you might actually be tempted to think this, as there's actually a whole lot of biblical material in the crayon, and the crayon has loose plagiarisms from the Old Testament, as well as a bunch from the New Testament, and the reason for this is, is that the crayon teaches that God really did reveal himself to these characters in the Old Testament and the New Testament, but what they believe is that God told them the true message of Islam within those profidious Jews and Christians to mess up the message, and so what the crayon does is it takes those same stories and it retells them in the proper way as it really happened, so they all have a slightly different twist on them, that actually have important effects, which we'll go through, because I want to go through and just point out a few of the main stories that are in the crayon and the Bible and how the crayon changes them, though there's a whole lot more stories, but we don't have time to get into all of them, I just want to point out a few of the main ones. So first one I want to go through is the story of Abaneev.

One of the most important aspects of the creation story in the Bible is the idea of Abaneev being made of the image and likeness of God. Now in the crayon, when it tells the creation story, it has different details, it is very important that it never mentions the Abaneev or made of the image and likeness of God. Now in a strange sort of weird scene, the angels bow down, they all make the angels bow down to Abaneev, but it never explains why, and the fact that it's missing that is made of the image and likeness of God is extremely important, because as the blessed John Paul, the second, stated in his encyclical Evangelion V-Tag, that the only thing that gives absolute value to human life is the fact that man is made of the image of God. So when you're missing that, that is going to have very important consequences on your view on the importance of human life.

Second of all, that in the Quranic story, Abaneev, they want to lose track of where I am, but it's important, one thing is they also don't eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Another important thing is that they eat from the tree of eternity. Now this is important because as the Navarre Bible explains, and I'll read a quote from it, that the fact that man had access to the tree of knowledge of good and evil means that God left the way open to the possibility of evil in order to ensure greater good, the freedom that is man's endowment. By using his reason and following his conscience, man is able to discern what is good and what is evil, but he himself cannot make something good or evil.

Now this is important because in Islam, the idea of reason, free will, and discernment are completely denied. And so instead of being tempted with the prospect of moral awareness, and the enemy for just tempted with everlasting life, and the end result is God banishes on the earth, so Eden, there you go, was this, somewhere, it wasn't even on earth, it was somewhere like up in the heavens. And another important aspect is that in the story in the Qur'an, there is no concept of original sin, it consequences punishments for this. And this is why the idea of being able to build heaven on earth, that the kingdom of God here on earth is not completely foreign to Islam, and this goes back to explaining that tying together of religion and politics, the reason that we don't tie together religion and politics too closely in Christianity is because we believe we never can build heaven here on earth, while the Muslims do think that's possible because of no original sin.

Now another story, we'll skip over Noah and go to Moses, is a story of Moses and the Exodus. And this, the count also has many alterations from that in Christianity. So for instance, when Moses performs his miracles, they have the story of the staffing throw down and turn into a snake. Interestingly in the story, it says that Pharaoh's, his source or others, they're so impressed by Moses's magic that they can become Muslims, which is interesting, says Muslims run around yet.

And then it also is important to that when the Bible states that the, talks about the plagues having in Egypt, that the Bible states that these happen because of the Egyptians were proud and sinful people, proud and sinful in quotations from the Bible. And then an almost exact passage in the Qur'an, they changed it from being a proud and sinful people to saying it's because they were an ignorant people. Now this is important because in Islam, God doesn't so much send his prophets to say people from sin, but from ignorance. And that has huge implications when you're talking about a moral framework, which we're going to get to in a little bit.

And then also in the story of Moses, you get to see some of the really sloppy confusion of biblical details as well as the historical ones, such as the fact that the Qur'an multiple times refers to Moses as Jesus's uncle. And the reason of this is, is that Miriam, Jesus's sister, that is the same name in Hebrew as Mary. And so they got the two confused. So Miriam and Mary and they thought they were the same person.

So it talks about Jesus's uncles of Moses and Aaron. Forget the fact they lived a couple thousand years apart from each other. Now, so we've gone through those, but what about Abraham, who is always seen as the sort of father of faith of all three religions. And now in the Qur'an does be very favorably Abraham.

And here's a little quote that says that, who actually Abraham, who they believe, that the Aaron people traditionally believe themselves to be a descendant of Abraham through Ishmael. And it actually has the story, they have a similar, so they try to elevate the position of Ishmael in the Qur'an. So the story, the sacrifice instead of sacrificing Isaac is the sacrifice of Ishmael. But also showing the favor that they showed Abraham quote from the Qur'an says, and who is there that has a fair religion than he who submits his will to God, being a good doer, and who follows the creed of Abraham, a man of pure faith.

And God took Abraham for a friend. So they refers to Abraham as a man of pure faith. Now it's interesting though, when you look at the context of referring to Abraham as a man of pure faith. That, and to go back a little bit, most of the Christians, like I said, they commonly think that this elevated position for Abraham is the exact same God all through religions.

In one place you only have to look at, you can look at talks from both President Obama and as well as President Bush, that when they both publicly praised Muslims for their, this is quote from President Obama, their shared roots of the world's Abrahamic faith. And Obama must have been assuming that the Islamic account of Abraham shared the sort of same expansive and generous vision of the Biblical one. Does it keep flashing? All right, that keeps throwing me off, it's correct.

One of the, anyway, the idea of the Biblical account of God, blessing all nations at your list because of Abraham and by the means of Abraham's immense faith. So however the Qur'an, when it praises Abraham's faith, it means something very different. I mean, you look at the actual context. So where that praise comes from, it comes right after this passage right here.

When Abraham says to his pagan relatives, we are a quid of you and that you serve apart from God, we disbelieve in you and between us and you, enmity has shown itself in hatred forever until you believe in God alone. So Abraham is only a model of emulation when he declares his enmity in hatred for the non-Muslims. And in the same passage right after that Abraham asked pardon for his father, and then this is presented as being a shameful act as the one shameful act of Abraham. So like I said, Abraham's hatred is of non-Muslims as well as presented as exemplary faith, while his praise for forgiveness are presented as shameful, which is far different than Christian understanding.

So this is why Vatican II states that they only profess the whole of faith of Abraham, not that they actually do. Now, if you get on into the New Testament, that there is very similar stories as well, that they talk about Jesus quite a bit, though they're gonna change some of the important parts. Now, so for instance, I want to just check myself. Yeah, so for instance, Jesus is presented, and this is as a model to follow, this is something that Muslim apologists always like to point out, like, hey, we believe in Jesus too, that he is presented as a model to follow, but not as the Son of God.

Instead, Jesus is presented as just sort of a prophet who preached the coming of the greatest prophet, Muhammad. He's sort of, as well as kind of like that of John the Baptist. And like the Gnostics before them, the Korean also teaches that Jesus wasn't really crucified, and because that would be too amenable to a fate for a prophet of God. So instead, what it says is that Jesus looks for a little like to take his place, and so in here's a quote that who volunteers to be made to look like me, for which he will be my companion in paradise.

And so there's different tradition of who was crucified in his place. Some had to say that it was Thomas, who was called the twin. Others actually say it was Judas, that he made to look like him, and so Judas does who died on the cross. And anyway, but this makes Jesus sound awful lot like the leaders of various Islamic terrorist groups that send misguided young men to go blow themselves up, but without ever actually endangering themselves.

Now, interestingly, probably interestingly, there's a lot of interesting stuff that the Korean also has does present an elevated role for Mary, and it does actually proclaim both the Immaculate Conception, as well as the Virgin Birth. And in Islamic tradition, Mary is second only to Muhammad's daughter, Fatima, in honor of all women throughout history. And there's a really interesting article that I got this week about from Archbishop Fulton Sheen, I'm sorry, before I move on, this guy just looked like he's having way too much fun. Anyway, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, that was fascinating.

When he goes through, and he argues that he believes that someday, God will convert all the Muslims to Christianity and to Christ through their honor of Mary. And this is one of the reasons he argues why Mary revealed herself at Fatima to give hope of this fact. And when he points out that the town of Fatima was actually named after a Muslim princess, who when the Muslims, they had one point control of Portugal, and when the Christians drove them out of Portugal that the last Muslim chief and his daughter, who was named Fatima, that she stayed behind and married Christian and became a Christian. And they named the town after her in her honor.

And so interestingly, when they took the statue of Arleidia Fatima, the missionary statue, and they took it around the world, and they took it to different Muslim countries, like India and North Africa. Muslims came out in hundreds of thousands to show devotion to Arleidia Fatima. So interesting, so, oh, it's not interesting again. So, from Sheen argues that a good missionary strategy for the Muslims would be the preaching of Arleidia Fatima.

Now, so we've gone through, we've seen how they don't entirely, what we call the Abrahamic faith, but another important topic is the question of whether or not Muslims actually worship the same God, that this is, most people think like, oh, Muslims, Christians, Jews, they all worship the same God, but it's all basically kind of equal, and you sort of this relativistic view. Now, and it is important though, that Vatican II document Lumen Gencium, which is a dogmatic constitution of a ecumenical council, and therefore is binding on Catholics, does state that Muslims do in fact worship the same God, with the quote, along with, that Muslims, along with us, adore the one and merciful God, who are on the last day will judge mankind. So, because they do worship the one true God, however, just because they worship the one true true God, does not mean that they have the correct view of Him, or that they share the Christian understanding of that God, or actually an interesting thing is, you can say that the Jews have an incomplete view of God, because they don't believe in the firmness of God's revelation, and then Muslims have both an incomplete view of God, and then the distorted view of God on top of that. And so, first of all, Muslims do not, since they don't believe that Jesus was the Son of God, or the Savior of the world, they don't believe that God is triune, and the crayon actually several times explicitly denies the doctrine of the Trinity, although it never actually states it accurately.

Instead, Christians are rebuked in the crayon as a false, or falsely attempting to worship all our Jesus and Mary as three gods, so the Trinity instead, they forget the Holy Spirit, it's in the crayon, it's Jesus and Mary and all our, it's sort of like a trio of deities. So, that's one aspect that they get wrong. And then, another important aspect that is very essential is the idea of God as Father is completely foreign, in fact, blasphemous to Islam. And the reason this is that the crayon talks about this, and it blasts the idea of God being a Father, because there's this inability to separate the idea of divine fatherhood from physical terms.

So, the idea that God obviously can't be a physical Father, they take as meaning that God calling God as Father is completely absurd. Now, so to a pious Muslim, a prayer like our Father would be utterly alien and even presumptuous to the point of blasphemy. And so, instead of being a Father, God is just a Master of the universe and humans are his slaves. So, instead of the idea of the Father and children as the Christian relationship, it's Master and slave.

And that's why Islam just means literally submission. And this is why the hallmark of Islamic religious observance is external obedience, not likeness with the divine through interior transformation. Now, second point aspect of their view of God that has important consequences has to do with their idea of free will. And that Islam completely denies all free will.

And they believe in a very sort of Calvinist idea of basically double predestination. And this is the idea that no one can believe in Allah without all the first actively willing that they do so, but also no one can disbelieve in Allah without all the actively willing that they do so. And here's a good verse from the crayon that sort of shows this idea with, and to whom, sorry, and to whom, so ever God assigned no light, no light has he. And so, like I said, this is the idea that God predetermines and predestines some people from heaven, but he also makes some people that he predetermines and predestines is sent to hell.

And similar to John Calvin's idea. Now, ultimately though, the problem with this idea, and this is something next week when we start in the Reformation, if you come back and we'll get into this, is that without free will, man ultimately has no more culpability that even ultimately is the fault of God. But the crayon after it states that it always makes sure to say that even though man has absolutely no free will, he will still be held accountable for the things that he does. That's why it actually fit pretty well.

And anyway, this is a pretty sinister idea because it makes God sort of arbitrary and unloving and it's pretty hard to reconcile with the idea of a just and loving God. Now, one of the most important aspects that we'll spend a little bit longer on with our view of God is the idea that Muslims deny, sorry, they deny the idea that God has eternal nature. And instead, they believe that God is nothing but pure will. So, the Christian understanding of God is the idea that goodness, truth, and beauty are absolute reflections of the superlative nature of God.

So that God has this nature that is the definition of those things that he himself cannot even break. So God cannot choose to be evil because he cannot violate his own nature. But Muslims say that to say that God is in nature, that he himself cannot violate, would be somehow to diminish his sovereignty because God can do anything. Therefore, Islam argues that morality is decided simply by will of God, not by God's eternal nature.

And therefore, if God had willed a different morality, then that could have been okay too. So, for instance, if God had decided that evil was good and good as evil, he could have done that as well. Now, this is important, and actually this is an idea called nominalism, which we'll also get into that reformation next year, because the same idea was also influential on Martin Luther. But this is important because morality is not absolute in the Islamic view, and this is something we'll get into.

It's because it doesn't reflect God's eternal nature. It's basically based upon God's arbitrary will, which ultimately God could change at any time. And in fact, in the crayon, he does change at any time. Now, this is also important and why, for instance, the scientific revolution never happened in the Islamic world.

Because of the fact, the scientific revolution in the Western idea of science is a natural outgrowth of this idea of God having an immutable nature. And so the idea of divine consistency, that God has a nature that he can't violate and likewise creation reflects that principle. And it was all important to the idea of scientific inquiry that we can trust that nature is going to make sense, that it's gonna be consistent. But a very good book on this, if this is your thing, is there's a very good book that explains why that science rose in the West and not in the Islamic world, in some books called the Rise of Early Modern Science, Islam, China, and the West by a guy named Toby E.

Huff, published by Cambridge University Press, back when Cambridge published Good Things, and where he argues this exact same thing. And so for the Islamic culture, however, to affirm that God's creation operates according to immutable principles, there will actually be nothing sort of blasphemy. And so this is why Allah can actually contradict himself in Islam and in the crayon. And here's a good verse showing this from the crayon.

And for whatever verse we abrogate or cast into oblivion, we bring a better or the like of it. Knowest Thou Not That God is powerful over everything. This is chapter 2, verse 106. And this is something we'll get into in a little bit later.

It's this is beginning of a teaching called abrogation that whenever God contradicts himself in the crayon, when one verse completely contradicts another, that whichever one later just replaces the one that came first. Now, these false understandings of God, especially this last one, have important consequences on Islamic practices. So if God's nature is not absolute, then ultimately, morality is not absolute either. There is a basic moral framework, and go back, I completely forgot to mention with Moses that this guy's going to know this as well, that the story of the Ten Commandments is presented also in the crayon, but it never actually says what the Ten Commandments are.

There's no list that says these are the Ten Commandments. And this ties up the idea like, oh, there is morality, you are supposed to follow it, but it's not absolute. So there's always Thou Shall Not, but is basically the idea in the Islamic worldview. And we'll go through this sort of one by one of these, yeah, these Thou Shall Not Butts.

Now, in the first of these, we talk about, is what the idea of jihad, that the crayon teaches that the taking of innocent life is wrong, but then goes on to provide exceptions. So it's the idea of Thou Shall Not Murder, unless, and so this ties in with the idea of jihad, that originally that jihad was used in the crayon to mean to sort of the interior struggle, that's something we talked about last week, for the mastery of self, but in contradiction that comes later on, after they've already stated that taking of innocent life is wrong, it gets sort of flipped on its head, and it's taken to mean violent warfare against non-Muslims. And the best place to see that this case is in the life of Muhammad, who we went through last week, because remember we said how Muhammad is upheld as the perfect example of how all Muslims are to follow, that anyway, in the life of Muhammad, one needs to just look and see that he was not some sort of peaceful, sagacious prophet, but rather to pay warlord who brutally attacked and conquered his enemies than name of Islam. And actually the best place to see this is from actually Islamic source, that there's a great translation by a guy named, I don't know how to pronounce it very well, A, Guli'an, if you ever actually want to, if you actually aren't interested in reading things, I want me to tell you afterwards, I'm more than happy to.

But anyways, the translation of this Islamic, the most famous Islamic historian of all time, who lived in the Middle Ages, a guy named even Ishak. He wrote basically a life of Muhammad, the most famous biography of Muhammad, and almost every single page just shows the brutal nature of Muhammad and it completely wipes away the myth of the whitewash peaceful Muhammad, as he's presented out as. Now, furthermore, that the Quran also counsels war and the second form of jihad, and I'm gonna read you a series of quotes, and it's just because it is a simple fact that the Quran advocates war against unbelievers, AKA Christians and Jews. So first quote is, Oprah Prophet, Strive Hard, or an Arabic jihadi, against the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and be firm against them, their boat is held in evil, refuge indeed, chapter nine, verse 73.

Another one, when you meet the unbelievers in the battlefield, strike off their heads, and when you have laid them low behind your captors firmly, chapter 47, verse four. Next one is those who believe fight, or the word used as jihadi in the cause of Allah, and those who reject faith fight in the cause of evil. So fight you against the friends of Satan, chapter four, verse 76. And another is, Allah, half-purchased of the believers, their persons, and their goods, and for theirs is the garden of paradise, they fight in his cause, jihadi in slay and our slain, chapter nine, verse 11, and the last one is, this is famous, it's called the verse of the sword from chapter nine, verse five, when it says, then when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever you find them, take them captive and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush, but if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor do, then leave their way free low.

Allah is forgiving, merciful. Now, interestingly, jihad is not just recommended, but it's actually presented as the highest duty of all Muslims. When it, in another person, it says, do ye make the giving of drink to pilgrims, or the maintenance of the sacred mosque, equal to the pious service of those who believe in Allah and the last day, and strive with might and main in the cause of Allah, and the Arabic there, is jihad, fe, sab, yu, Allah, they are not comparable in the side of Allah, those who believe and suffer exile, and strive with might and main, jihad, fe, al-seb, yu, Allah, with their goods and their persons, have the highest rank in the side of Allah, they are the people who will achieve salvation. Now, one may attempt to spiritualize these verses, but this is why we started the history last week, because the historical record sort of speaks for itself, and then also if you look at those four schools, the Islamic jurisprudence, that all four of them affirm historically that those verses all will be taken literally.

Now, so this is showing an example of, so there is this idea of peace, of not killing, but since there's no more absolutes, it's okay to have the exceptions. Now, and likewise an important concept, which I said we come back to, that abrogation, that there are plenty of peaceful verses in the crayon, this is something you always hear on TV, you know, saying, well, the crayon is a very peaceful book, and but the interesting thing is that the crayon is not arranged chronologically, but for the most part, by the length of the chapters of the seras. And so in the tolerant verses in the crayon, all came from Muhammad's time in Mecca, when he was simply preaching, trying to convert the mechanism to Islam, and then the later verses came from his time in Medina, when he became increasingly violent and tolerant. And so the Islamic idea of abrogation is the idea that the later the verse comes, it cancels out the contradictory verses that came first.

So for instance, that verse of the sword, nine five, is actually one of the very last parts added to the crayon, so according to Islamic jurisprudence, and their interpretation of the crayon, it cancels out every single other following verse before. Now, is there a might just sort of cherry picking verses to make Islam a violent answer as no, or maybe a little bit, no. No, in fact, the unpleasant fact is that violent jihad warfare against unbelievers is not a heretical idea Islam, but historically is, so actually now, I was talking about, yeah, I was here, sorry, I'll go back, it's talking about the violent jihadis as being like this little tiny minority that have a high jacket peaceful religion, but if you look historically, they're the Orthodox ones. And anyway, and this is constantly be, like I said, reaffirmed our history of Islamic jurisprudence and current commentary, and it's true all four of the main student schools of jurisprudence.

Now, likewise, not just with warfare that you see this, muddling of morality, but another place you see this is even like lying and stealing. So for instance, the crayon is very clear and says that to steal from a fellow Muslim, you do so, you're full of it, your hand, but it's okay to steal from non-Muslims, and in particular, when it states that all the problems is the vast riches and booty to the Muslims when they conquer their enemies, so that they are, it's perfectly fine to take all the stuffs of the Christians and the Jews. And likewise, lying is condemned at multiple times at the crayon, it says that we're supposed to tell the truth, however, unless it is in the case of advancing the cause of Islam. Now, and another big one that will, this is the last main part, they'll have multiple parts to it that we'll get into is the idea of a shared sexual ethic that this is very popular idea amongst even very Orthodox Catholics that we think, hey, opposed to the secular culture that we can look for an ally on, for instance, the idea of having a big family and the understanding against abortion, that the Muslims would actually stand as a sort of a good ally.

So for instance, with like said, fornication, adultery, the sanctity of marriage, the importance of bearing children, and also to areas Catholics believe, commonly believe, that Catholic and Muslim world teaching is basically identical. But once again, they are not, there are some serious important differences that we can go through. Furthermore, Islamic morality does allow for some practices that are completely abhorrent to Catholics, such as, we'll get to such as contraception, child marriage, polygamy, female genital mutilation, and even sexual slavery of non-believing women. Islam, teachings on women and sexuality appeal to the worst in man, and this is, in summed up pretty well in the quote by John Quincy Adams, that this is the snippet of his quote, but when he states that the essence of Muhammad's doctrine was violence and lust to exult the brutal over the spiritual part of human nature.

And this brutal lust has done much to dehumanize and subjugate women in the Islamic world, something that does not always get a whole lot of press. But one thing in particular that Catholics always always say, well, at least Muslims are against abortion. But that is not entirely true either. That Islam teaches that killing, protecting the crann states and the killing of its children is a very evil thing to do.

And but however, the Islamic idea is that God breathes the soul into the baby at the end of the first trimester. So under Islamic law, abortion is actually permitted for if necessary in the first trimester. Second of all, with the idea of contraception, Muslims do stand firm against some direct forms of contraception such as sterilization for non-medical reasons, but Islam does not forbid contraception. In fact, Muhammad proves of it several times in the different Hadiths very explicitly and in kind of those terms.

And in Islam, there is no idea of the inseparability of the unitative and procreative aspects of the marital act. And this is extremely important because this very effect accounts for the moral, sexual ambiguity in the Islamic world and is in fact the same reason for the moral, sexual ambiguity that is in the West that's followed the sexual revolution. And because the idea is that by the separation of the unitative and procreative aspects is what leads to the dehumanization of women, because it turns women into nothing but objects of pleasure. And this is something we see both in the Islamic cultures as well more recently in our own.

Now, this is one of the things that led to the practice, for instance, of polygamy in Islamic world which the Quran states that men can have as many as four lives, except for Muhammad who does as many as he wanted. And this, once again, continues to reduce women to the status of mere commodities. And in Islamic world also, for instance, divorce. It is very easy to divorce your wife.

In fact, all a man has for a man that all you have to do is say, I divorce you. And then wait three months to make sure she's not pregnant. And then she is divorced. And it's a longer process that's more difficult if a woman wants to.

But now, an interesting fact is that in the Western world, while we've lost our moral philosophical ability to argue for standards of sexual ethic, so we are not able to argue, for instance, very well. Now, the age of philosophical against gay marriage and things like that, there is still vestiges of when you look at, when you have 2,000 years of Christian heritage, that there is these vestiges of Christian morality that just get sort of ingrained in the culture. So ideas, for instance, like pedophilia are important to the West, even though we can't come up with a good philosophical reason why. However, it is important thing to remember, too, that the Islamic cultures of the East, they do not have that 2,000 years of Christian culture backing their morality.

So when you add the fact that they, too, philosophically, cannot argue against these practices. But then you add the fact that their heritage actually is formed more by the hedonistic practices of the East in Persia, that this explains why you end up with all sorts of practices like life-spy child pornography. For instance, whenever they killed a son of a lot and they found child pornography, all over his computer, this is one of the breakdowns. When our soldiers go over to Afghanistan, there's been a lot of articles about we have a real hard time dealing with the Afghanis, because, for instance, pedophilia is considered just affordable that everybody does, and our soldiers, who may not be Christian, they find this completely abhorrent, and so they have a hard time getting along.

And so like I said, when you have a religion that is not able to provide concrete morality, that's what you end up with. And another couple aspects of this is, for instance, the practice of child marriage, that in Islam, you look at Muhammad as the example for all things, and Muhammad married his wife at Esha when she was six years old. And as we stated last week, don't worry, consummate the marriage until she was nine. And therefore, for instance, in Iran, the legal age for a girl to get married is nine, following Muhammad's example.

And in, for instance, in 2002, in a study by UNICEF at refugee camps in Afghanistan, in one camp, two thirds of the second great girls were either married or engaged. And the other thing is the crayon also permits sex slaves captured in battle as long as they're not Muslims. And the she-eyes also practice something called temporary marriage, or basically married with a deadline, which is just a fig leaf of morality placed upon prostitution. And anyway, the reason I point these things out is, like I said, as a show, how when God becomes pure arbitrary will, the standards of morality become blurred, and why we need to be careful in talking to Muslims about whether or not they worship the same God to be clear about the very real and very important differences in our understandings of God.

And the idea is that all morality ultimately flows from our understanding of God and our worldview. And those differences have tremendous consequences. Now, this ties in with the idea of, for instance, of what humanism really means. That there is a common idea nowadays that a humanism means that we gloss over all the differences between us and other religions, because the idea is if you speak, then we think that the point out truth is somehow uncharitable, that it's somehow disparaging of the human being, which is not, is just pointing out truth.

And so the idea of true humanism is an order to say politics, speaking the truth with love, and trying to call others to dialogue, and not to gloss over the truth, but to point it out, constantly praying that all men will eventually be united in the truth of Christ, which is ultimately found in the Catholic Church.