Adam Francisco (DPhil in Islamic and Christian Relations, Oxford University) is professor of history at Concordia University in Irvine, California. He's a frequent contributor to Modern Reformation magazine and editor of Theologia et Apologia: Essays in Reformation Theology and Its Defense (Wipf & Stock, 2007).
How did you become interested in Islam?
A. My first real interest in Islam started around 1999 when I was working on a research project on Martin Luther and his view of the Turks. The Ottoman Turks were pushing up through Hungary during the heyday of the early Reformation, and I looked at how Luther may have approached Islam apologetically. This research was more of a historical concern. Afterward, I applied to do graduate work at Oxford in Luther studies in this particular topic; but as I was prepping to make the trip to England, 9/11 happened. The date September 11 itself is significant: September 11, 1683, is the last jihad on Europe, at the behest of the Ottomans. All these things started clicking, and I thought maybe I should look at this a little more broadly than just sixteenth-century European-Ottoman relations.
How did you acquire the expertise to teach about Islam and then suggest how to reach Muslims with the gospel?
A. I studied at the University of Oxford and its Center for Islamic Studies, which is run and funded by Muslims. It was trial by fire in many ways. My dissertation supervisor was a high profile scholar of Islam, David Timea, who has been called al-Qaida's philosopher. For three years, he put me through the wringer, and I'm extremely grateful for it. He told me exactly what Muslims thought of particular passages in the Koranic text, and he schooled me in Arabic.
Islamic History
For those who may not be familiar with Islamic history, could you give us a thumbnail sketch?
A. Historically speaking’and the historical record isn't great’Islam began in a.d. 610 when Mohammed was about forty. He was involved in trading from his hometown of Mecca up to Syria, where he may have heard Christian claims, perhaps espoused by Christians who were outside the creedal consensus of the church on who Christ was’at least that's the tradition that's been passed down.
So the "Christians" he encountered in his travels may not have been orthodox?
A. I think that's right. It's hard to prove that historically, of course, but everything sort of lines up there. He may have heard monotheistic claims, if we can put it that way, which certainly would have contradicted the claims he heard down in Mecca. The ancient Arabs before Islam were primarily polytheists. They worshipped pretty much anything: stones, the moon, stars. In fact, it is said that Mohammed's tribe was responsible for overseeing and maintaining the Kaaba, that square-like black-covered structure in Mecca today. Allegedly, there were three hundred sixty idols that represented every god worshipped in the Arabian Peninsula. Every Arab tribe would annually visit that idol, and Mohammed's family would, of course, reap the benefits financially for that.
When Mohammed was about twenty-five, a wealthy’and perhaps even attractive’woman named Khadijah proposed marriage to him, and all of a sudden he no longer had to work so much. The way the biographical tradition puts it, he began taking retreats, pondering in a cave the great questions of life. I can't prove this, but I imagine that the claims he heard up in Syria, which contrasted so remarkably with those in Mecca, made him ponder which religion was true. Who is the true God? Maybe that's giving him too much credit, but it's certainly feasible.
After being in this cave for over fifteen years and not coming to a conclusion, one night in the ninth month of the lunar calendar, he started to hear a voice. At first, he thought the voice was coming from the jinni, bodiless spirits that in-habit the earth, and that he had become possessed by them. But after three years he was convinced that this voice and the continual voices he had been hearing and the impressions he had been getting in his mind were not the jinni toying with him, but rather Allah, the Creator of the universe, who had been sending down his message to him, using the angel Gabriel. Around 610’613, he took the so-called prophetic mantle around and began to preach to the people of Mecca. From 610’622, he preached that there is no God but Allah; all the idols the Arabs have been worshiping are false; there is only one God and he is Allah. Allah in Arabic simply means "the Creator" or "the God." It's not a personal name; it's like Elohim in Hebrew and not like Yahweh.
After he started preaching that there's only one God, he also attached to it the claim that if you do not turn from your polytheism, you're going to spend an eternity in hellfire. And that's pretty much the core, theologically speaking, of what Mohammed preached in Mecca.
If you open up a Koran, which isn't put together chronologically’it's difficult to understand how this all unfolded unless you have a good Koran that tells you when the so-called revelations were given. It's basic monotheism, if you will. Things change radically, though, around 622’which is the year Muslims hold to be "year one." Islam really began when Mohammed moved from Mecca with around a hundred followers, who were for the most part being persecuted.
Around 622, then, he received the offer to go up to what would eventually be called Medina, where he was given political, military, and religious authority over the city. In passages from this period in the Koran, Islam was not altered but started to define itself theologically, politically, and legally. That's the Islam with which we're familiar, I think: not only the claim that there's no god but God, but also that Islam is the true continuation of the faith of Abraham, even the faith of Adam, and all the prophets of the past. Jews and Christians, while they might claim to be monotheists, have gone astray at some point over time and are therefore only loosely connected with the so-called Abrahamic tradition.
Is there something to the claim that earlier Meccan Islam, the Mohammed of Mecca, was more open to "people of the book," but that the later Medinan Mohammed is really what we know as Islam today?
A. Yes and no. The Koran is curious with regard to its treatment of Christianity. On some occasions, it praises it and holds it in high regard. On other occasions (such as Koran 9:29), it enjoins Muslims to kill Christians and Jews if they don't submit to Islam either as a faith or at least as a political and legal system by paying additional taxes and things. The Meccan passages on Christianity largely regard it as an ally. Koran 29:46 has Mohammed telling what few followers he has that when they come across the people of the book (Jews and Christians), they should not deal harshly with them; rather, Muslims should tell them that their God and our God, that their revelation and our revelation, is one. Everyone loves to quote Koran 109, especially the last verse where Mohammed is responding to the Meccan elders who tell him to tone down his preaching because it was upsetting the status quo. Mohammed says to them, "You have your religion; I have mine." Lots of folks like that passage to assert that Islam is open to a pluralistic environment. It recognizes differences but is comfortable living alongside polytheists or Christians or Jews.
So we get this picture of Islam and its relationship with Christianity and even Judaism early on, but then we get these strongly anti-Christian passages in the later Medinan period. That's accounted for in at least two ways. One school of Islamic thought says that the revelation that Allah sent down has a progression. Early on, Allah saw that Islam was being persecuted by the Meccan elite and knew it was in danger of becoming extinct so he allowed for Mohammed and the Muslim community to look for allies. Later on, when he didn't need them, he turned his back on them’the Jews especially, but also the Christians, up in Medina. Another school of thought says that there is a contradictory picture of Christianity that is resolved by saying there are at least two Christianities being talked about in the Koran. When it's positive toward Christianity, it's talking about what we would call "heretical Christianity"’maybe Arianism or Nestorianism, some version of Christianity that perhaps was around in the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century that did not confess creedal Christianity ‘regarding Christ perhaps as a prophet but certainly not the divine son of God. When the Koran speaks negatively of Christianity, it's referring to creedal or orthodox Christianity. There are other positions, but those are the two prominent ones.
Because, of course, Arian "Christians" would have had a great deal of sympathy with some of Mohammed's concerns, right?
A. Absolutely. We don't know a whole lot about the Arabian Peninsula before the seventh century, so we can't confirm where Arianism had spread at that point. There just aren't any written sources besides a few fragments of poetry. Though some research, primarily archaeological, done in the last fifteen years has been finding evidence that there are these Arian-leaning Christian sects, sort of like a Jewish Christianity, that would have certainly downplayed or rejected the deity of Jesus, seeing him rather as a prophetic figure.
Islamic Theology
Let's talk about "doctrine" briefly. It's important for us as Christians not to impose our categories on Islam, as if they were concerned, for instance, about doctrine as Reformation Christians would be. What does the Koran say about Jesus?
A. Jesus is mentioned over a dozen times in the Koran, with most of the detail in chapter 19. The Koran says that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary. In fact, Mary is the only female named in the Koran. He grows up and performs lots of miracles over the course of his life. The Koran doesn't get into the particulars, but it does say he healed the sick, raised the dead, and so on. The Koran does record one particular miracle of Jesus as a child where he impresses his friends by blowing on a clay pigeon and causing it to become alive. There are a couple places in the Koran that are almost verbatim transcription from Talmudic or noncanonical Christian sources, but we don't get a whole lot about the content of his teaching.
He's regarded as a prophet of Allah. According to chapter 19 of the Koran, his first miracle occurred when he was an infant. Mary was a bit distraught because she wasn't married and had a child, and had to explain to her family how this happened. When Jesus was placed in a cradle, he looked up and comforted her by saying, "Don't worry, Mary. I am a prophet of Allah." So he's regarded as a prophet of Allah and a prophet of Islam, but as a prophet of Islam to the nation of Israel. His prophetic ministry was confined to that group of people.
There's also a picture in Koran 4:157 saying that the Jews claimed to have crucified the Christ, the Messiah’which is merely an honorific title’but in fact they didn't crucify him, nor was Christ killed at all. In the commentaries on the Koran, there are many theories posed in explanation. The prominent one is that Jesus was sitting with his disciples and asked them if someone wanted to take his place, and Judas raised his hand. His face was transformed to look like Jesus, the roof parted, and Jesus was taken up to heaven. Judas was eventually crucified in his place, and he's still up in the second or third realm of heaven waiting to return at the last day. Koran 5:117’118 says at the last day, when all the dead are raised and the living are raised up with them, and everybody's being judged on the basis of their good or bad deeds, Jesus will come down and Allah will point to a group of Christians, perhaps all Christians, and say to Jesus, "Did you tell them that they should regard you and your mother Mary as God, that they should take you as lords?" And Jesus responds, "I would have never told them such a thing. I would have never told them what you did not tell me to tell them." So once again, an unusual type of Christianity that confesses Jesus as the Son of God and Mary as a part of God (much like Nestorianism) is renounced.
The traditional literature develops things further to claim that Jesus, after that judgment, will join forces with the Islamic Messiah and find every crucifix that's ever been made and crush it, and that he will hunt down and kill every last pig on earth. A more spurious tradition says that he will also hunt down the Jews and persecute and kill them as well.
Is there any gospel, any good news in Islam? Or is it all law?
A. It is all law. You can read the Koran and see that it's filled with legal and moral injunctions, and though you can never be sure, your eternal destiny’whether you're going to heaven or hell’is largely dependent upon whether you've really followed the sharia and stayed on the straight path. The only way to be sure is to die as a martyr. But even then, the Koran says that if you die as a martyr, when you go up and are enjoying your seventy-two virgins and drinking as much wine as you want without getting a headache, it's such an honor to die as a martyr that you'll petition to go back and die in the cause of Allah again.
After I've had an apologetic discussion with a Muslim, perhaps to open up their mind a bit to read a Gospel for an eyewitness or a companion of an eyewitness to the real Jesus, I always ask them the classic evangelistic questions. What about your salvation? Can you be certain of this? If you were to die, can you be certain you'd enter heaven at some point? Their response is always, "No, I couldn't be certain, nor do I care." I remember one Lutheran convert to Islam, a young woman, told me that her concern and the concern of any Muslim is just to be a good submitter to Allah’what Allah does with them in the afterlife has already been predetermined.
