Christianity and Islam-- past, present, and future

From UVA History professor Robert Louis Wilken, excerpts from a long and informative essay in First Things.

As Wilken claims, he is "no apologist for Islam", but he has some pessimistic things to say about the spread of Islam (from a Christian perspective).


First, some then-contemporary historical perspective:

When one considers the extent of Christianity in the year 600, the deep roots Christians had set down all over the world as they knew it, and the interconnectedness of the churches, it is no wonder that Christians had difficulty grasping that the Arab armies occupying their cities were not simply conquerors seeking booty but heralds of a spiritually potent religion and architects of a new civilization.

The first recorded comment of a Christian reaction to Muhammad dates from only a couple of years after his death. When tales of a prophet among the Arabs reached Christian Syria, someone asked an old man, “What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?” The old man groaned deeply and said, “He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword.” He had in mind of course the Hebrew prophets, Elijah or Isaiah or Amos. A prophet is one called to speak for God.

But his memory of the Bible was imperfect, for he had overlooked the greatest of the prophets before Jesus: Moses. Like the later prophets, Moses was certainly called to speak for God, but, unlike Isaiah or Ezekiel, Moses was also a political and military leader and, let it not be forgotten, a lawgiver. And he carried a sword: In the Book of Numbers, we learn that he armed a thousand men from each tribe of Israel to take vengeance on the Midianites.

It is this biblical prophet, Moses, who was the model for Muhammad. Though Muslims see Abraham as the first to believe in the one God—and thus the first muslim and the ancestor of the Arabs through Ishmael—the prophet mentioned most often in the Qur’an is Moses. Muhammad was, like Moses in the words of St. Stephen in the Acts of the Apostles, “powerful in words and deeds.”...

But the reality:

In the long view of history, and especially from a Christian perspective, the Turkish conquest of Asia Minor was of far greater significance. The arrival of the Turks prepared the way for the displacement of the Greek-speaking Christians in Byzantine Anatolia, the planting of Islam in the Balkans, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453....

Consider some statistics. In the eleventh century, the population of Asia Minor was almost wholly Christian. By the sixteenth century, Muslims constituted 92 percent of the population. During those centuries, the Church lost most of its property, its ecclesiastical structures were dismantled, and its bishops prohibited from caring for their dioceses....

We are all familiar with textbook accounts of Christianity as a tale of growth and expansion as it spread from the countries on the shores of the Mediterranean...

If, however, one injects into this sanguine narrative the story of Islam, things take on a different coloring. Set against the history of Islam, the career of Christianity is marked as much by decline and extinction as it is by growth and triumph. By a selective choice of periods, events, and geographical regions, the conventional account (the one imagined from the perspective of Europe and North America) gives the impression of continuous progress.

But seen in global perspective, that may be illusory. To state the obvious: Most of the territories that were Christian in the year 700 are now Muslim. Nothing similar has happened to Islam. Christianity seems like a rain shower that soaks the earth and then moves on, whereas Islam appears more like a great lake that constantly overflows its banks to inundate new territory. When Islam arrives, it comes to stay—unless displaced by force, as it was in Spain. But the shameful expulsion of Muslims from Spain is hardly an event Christians would wish to celebrate today....

Wilken makes an important point, but exaggerates it by starting his history at 700 AD.

Now moving to the present...

Europe’s place in Christian history is singular and without parallel....[And] Christianity has had an abiding physical presence in Europe. The bonds of affection are attached to place: Its churches, shrines, tombs, and pilgrimage sites were imprinted deeply on the Christian soul. The demise of Christianity in Europe and the ascendancy of Islam would be a crippling blow to the continuity of Christian memory and the sense that the Church is the carrier of an ancient, unbroken, living tradition that reaches back through time to the apostles and to Jesus. Memory is an integral part of Christian faith, but unattached to things it is infinitely malleable, even ­evanescent, like a story whose veracity is diluted as its particulars are forgotten. Without tangible links to the past mediated through communities tethered to the earth, something precious is lost....

If Christianity continues to decline in Europe and becomes a minority religion, its history will appear fragmentary and episodic and its claim to universality further diminished by the shifting patterns of geography....

Wilken then comments on the role of the land in Islam (and one could add, Judaism) vs. Christianity.

In a way that is not true of Christianity, Islam is territorial. One of Islam’s most enduring innovations was that religious law became also the law of the body politic. Shari’a is more encompassing than the Church’s canon law, and historically its authority depended on a community with territorial boundaries and political jurisdiction. This understanding is of course being tested today and has been debated by Muslim thinkers since the nineteenth century. But most Muslims in the world live in countries in which Islam occupies a conspicuous public space in society. Even in countries such as India, where Muslims do not make up the majority, the feeling of solidarity and belonging runs deep....

What about the future?

As Muslims have struggled to come to terms with modernity as we know it in the West, Islam as a religion has not gone into remission. The remarkable truth is that the peoples and societies that were part of the Muslim world five centuries ago have remained resolutely and unreservedly Islamic. Turkey is a good example of the resilience of Islam in modern times....

The question to be asked, then, is whether, face to face with Islam, Christians will be able to sustain, rebuild, and create strong and resilient communities that provide institutional anchorage for the faith to endure and flourish. Will they have the imagination to form the spiritual architecture of the societies of which they are a part? This is a task for which Christianity is particularly well suited. It has a much longer lineage than Islam, it has taken many different cultural forms in the course of its history, and it has passed through the fires of modernity. It has a deeper and more coherent relation to its own tradition, including the cultural patrimony of classical antiquity. And it commands the intellectual resources to understand and engage other religious traditions as well as to provide moral inspiration for secular societies.

Unlike Islam, Christianity began as a community distinct from the body politic, and for three hundred years it existed independently of political authority. This early history has never been forgotten. Even in the time of Christian hegemony in the West, during the age of Charlemagne, Abbot Wala of Corbie insisted that the Church constituted a parallel sovereignty. The king, he said, should have public properties for the maintenance of his army, and the Church should have “church properties, almost like a second public domain.”

Augustine’s metaphor for the new life in Christ was not that of an individual’s being born again but that of becoming part of a city with its own form of governance. “Happy the people whose God is the Lord,” wrote the psalmist. Though some may eschew the term, in the decades to come the great challenge for Christians will be to fashion, within the cultural and political conditions of the twenty-first century, a new kind of ­Christendom.