In a recent message to my email list subscribers I touched on the fact that we need a new strategy for interactions between Muslims and Christians, whether in America or in other countries throughout the world. I suggested Jesus of Nazareth as a model for our interactions. He demonstrated how to respect and strengthen relationships with those who were like him and those who were very different from him. He pointed people to God and painted a picture of what God’s Kingdom is really like.

One of the ways we begin to be able to connect to others different from ourselves is to understand them; eliminating barriers or unnecessary misunderstandings between us. An issue I hear over and over from Christians who struggle to understand Muslims is the belief that we worship two different Gods and that Allah is a false god.

This is one of the most painful misunderstandings. Many Christian laymen and leaders feel that Allah is not the same God as the God of the Hebrews, or Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Ishmael. In fact, they will often argue Allah is a moon-god. Televangelist Benny Hinn has commented, “This is not a war between Arabs and Jews. It’s a war between God and the devil.”

It would be wonderful if Christians and Muslims could get beyond the basics of respecting another’s name for God and reach a consensus. It would open doors to desperately needed dialogue and communication, allowing the Holy Spirit to reveal common ground as to the nature of God. Let us make sure this “feeling” towards Allah is not merely a trained cultural response and/or an emotional one, but instead cultivate a view founded on fact and linguistics, seated in an understanding of the history and culture surrounding the origins of the names for God. Let us also approach this issue asking God to reveal the truth to us, as much as we are able to understand.

Seminary Students Consider: Is Allah a moon-god?

I recall speaking to an assembly of seminary students in Lancaster, PA a few years ago. When questioned, their view was unanimous that Allah was a false god and in fact, derived from a moon-god of ancient times. They were ready and had a prepared statement to read:

During the nineteenth century[1], then later in the 1940’s[2], and finally during the 1950’s[3], archeologists’ digs gathered from both North and South Arabia depict evidence of a moon-god (called Hubal during pre-Islamic times). This deity was worshiped even in the Prophet Muhammad’s day. According to inscriptions, while the name of the moon-god was not Allah, his title was al-ilah, i.e. “the deity,” meaning that he was the chief or high god among the gods.

The moon-god was called al-ilah, “the god.” However, this name (Arabic: Il or Ilah) did not originate as a title for the moon-god. Thousands of years before that, Semites used variations of Il/El and Alah to refer to their high gods.

Noted Christian historian Philip Hitti also feels the designation of Allah as a moon-god is not correct. [4][5][6] The Islamic symbol of the crescent moon is often raised as evidence reflecting a moon god. However, history reveals that the Ottoman invaders of the Byzantine Empire simply adopted their defeated Christian foe’s symbol of the crescent moon and continued using it.[7]

Muhammad viewed monotheists in history such as Abraham and those in his time as haneef, believers in the One Supreme God, creator of the heavens and universe, inspirer of the prophets through the Rouh Qudus, the “Holy Spirit.”And the word he used for this God was Allah.

I shared with the seminary students,

“If Allah was indeed one of the 360 gods represented in the Kabba in Mecca prior to Muhammad, it does not preclude one of them being the One True God of the Old and New Testament. It could be considered similar to Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17, identifying the true God from all the false idols. Muhammad did the same by destroying all the other idols in the Kabba, leaving the one ilah. The Apostle Paul faced similar push back with the Greek pagans as Muhammad did with the Arab pagans. After gaining their attention by quoting various Greek philosophers, Paul announced that he knew the name of this ‘unknown god’ and proceeded to teach of the one true God. The scripture says that while ‘some mocked…many followed and surrendered’ to God. The point being, that the origins of a name do not always reflect on the later application.”

The seminary students were listening, but I could tell they were not with me yet.

To further emphasize and explain this topic, I will delve further into the origins of the name “God” from a linguistic viewpoint on this blog in the coming weeks. Please feel free to follow along with us in exploring this issue.

Shalom, Shlama, and Salaam,

[1] Amaud, Halevy and Glaser went to Southern Arabia and dug up thousands of Sabean, Minaean, and Qatabanian documents that depict Allah as a moon god. Robert Morey, The Islamic Invasion: Confronting The World’s Fastest-Growing Religion (Harvest House Publishers, 1992)

[2] Archeologists G. Caton Thompson and Carleton S. Coon made discoveries in Arabia. Morey.

[3] Wendell Phillips, W.F. Albright, Richard Bower made similar discoveries as they excavated sites at Qataban, Timna, and Marib. Morey.

[4] Tracing the origins of ancient gods is often tenuous. If the name Hubal is related to an Aramaic word for spirit, as suggested by Hitti, then Hubal may have come from the north of Arabia. Philip K. Hitti, History Of The Arabs (1937), 96-101.

[5] Welllhausen indicates that Hubal was regarded as the son of al-Lat and the brother of Wadd. Wellhausen (1926), 717, as quoted by Hans Krause, Hans Krause’s Research Reports, http://hanskrause.de/HKHPE/hkhpe_32_01.htm.

[6] Attempts to identify Hubal with Allah have been notably popular among evangelical Christians, but even they acknowledge that this hypothesis is speculative, and it is contradicted by the Islamic-period texts from which most knowledge of pre-Islamic Arab religion derives. Answering Islam, Moon God, http://www.answering-islam.org/Index/M/moongod.html (Jul. 29, 2009).

[7] Rick Brown, “Who is ‘Allah’?” International Journal of Frontier Missions, 23:2 (Summer 2006), 80 (http://www.commonpathalliance.org).

One of the core ways for misunderstanding to build up is by receiving incomplete information about something someone else has said.  I believe this is a big part of the distrust between the Abrahamic faiths, and indeed, many of our broader misunderstandings today.  For example, the media can emphasize one particular phrase a person says, and build a completely different story based on that statement than what was intended.

In some cases, we simply lack the information to understand what a person is saying.  Consider some of Jesus’ phrases, which sound familiar to the Western mind, but perhaps we have not fully understood.  It is cases like these where studying the text through the Eastern lens reveals perspective we have not seen before.

Did Jesus Really Say, “I Come to Bring a Sword”?

“Do not suppose I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword.” At first blush, this verse seems to be in total contradiction to all the of Jesus’ teachings. How could the man who taught us to “turn the other cheek” and “love our enemies” by claiming that he came to bring a sword? In fact, this verse has even been used by some to justify violence against “non-believers.”

The truer meaning here is not sword, but division. This is more accurately rendered in the common English translations of the corresponding passage in Luke: “Do you think I have come to bring peace on earth? I say to you no, but divisions.”

The teachings of Jesus were so revolutionary and contrary to the political, social and religious order of the day that when people followed them, divisions among families, friends and institutions inevitably ensued. Dr. Lamsa comments that the Eastern idiomatic aspect of these verses were not known by the Greeks. Jesus never suggested that his followers ought to “take up the sword,” but rather that following him would inevitably cause “divisions” and persecutions-as history has in fact shown to be the case.

[The Aramaic example is excerpted from Appendix 3 of A Deadly Misunderstanding.]

If we realize we can misunderstand our own text without careful study and prayer for God to reveal the truth to us, how much more might we misunderstand a related but unique text of a neighboring faith?

Once again the country recoils from the violence that occurred last week at Ft. Hood.  I am deeply saddened to see this violence once again being linked to Islam, raising concerns against Muslims living in the US and in the military.  As always, I hear from my Christian friends, “Why don’t we hear condemnation from the Muslims for such horrific acts?” There are many Muslims who denounce the violence every time it occurs, as demonstrated by Muslim leaders in a press conference on November 5. On the other hand, some Muslims feel others must know they are people of peace and lament how the minority of extremists are causing the name of Muslims to be tarnished as a whole.  Some of them spoke out in the Indianapolis Star this week:

“There is no room in Islam for this kind of behavior. These people keep doing it, and it is unfortunate,” Siddiqui said. “We can only do our part and live our lives and live what we believe is true.”

One of the two Muslims in  Congress, Rep. Andre Carson, expressed concern for those impacted by the violence, but followed up with a further concern:

“[He] finds hypocrisy in the fact that faith has been at the heart of the discussion of the Fort Hood shootings when little has been said about the faith of a man who is accused of killing one person and injuring five at an office in Orlando, Fla., on Friday.”

We are wrestling as a nation; it is so tempting to pigeonhole religious beliefs as a motivator for this violence. In reality, both religion and unnumbered other factors are possible motivators in a person’s decision to inflict such horrible destruction on himself and others.   Do we oversimplify to make quick sense of the unexplainable?

I must repeat that in all my relations to those of the Muslim faith, the few I have encountered who think violence and God go together have twisted the truth.  It is a perversion of Islam, and a pervision in other religions or belief systems as well.  As a Sudanese sheikh once told me, true religion is a state of being.  A state of submission to God.

Yet where does this leave us?  We would do our best to view Muslims just as any others, free to live as any other American.  This is essential and a core of our Constitution.  Does this mean we ignore warning signs of extremism?  No.  But a warning does not indicate you to intern an entire people, but to aggressively fight to undermine the ideologies that influence a human to do evil against another person. In the aftermath of Ft. Hood, my friend Dr. Tawfik Hamid commented on the importance of addressing the ideologies of violence that, in certain cases, infiltrate religious education:

These educational or ideological factors must be addressed in an honest manner to avoid further calamities and to protect young Muslims from the damaging effects of these forms of teaching.

This battle for the heart and mind is a battle only God can truly win. We do well to both leave it to God and actively become his emissaries.  Not emissaries of judgment or ridicule, but emissaries of grace and mercy.  We love because he first loved us.  Do we have the right to any other option?

I would also like to share an excerpt from A DEADLY MISUNDERSTANDING that seems particularly apt and helpful in light of recent events.  You can find it on pages 219-222.

“Over the last few years, I have had the opportunity to spend some time with two former prime ministers of Somalia, a nearly 100 percent Muslim country so torn apart by its warring clans that it hasn’t had a functioning central government since 1991. Their comments echoed the same thoughts: as one lamented, since civil war seized his country the late 1980s, there had been endless division, lawlessness and interminable violence. He was now in the United States, he said, on a mission to find some kind of solution to his people’s seemingly interminable crisis.

I asked him what he thought was at the root of the problems in Somalia. Was it a religious division?

“No,” he replied, “we are all Muslims.”

Did he think it came down to a conflict based on ethnicity?

“No,” he repeated, “we are all essentially the same ethnic background.”

Was it tribal? He shook his head. Cultural? He sighed, and shook his head again. Grasping at straws, I asked if there were differences in language or dialect?

“No,” he said, “we mostly all speak the same language.”

Why would the Somali people stay so alienated for so long, and over what? What would drive the rage, mistrust, and wanton killing of neighbors and friends if they are all essentially the same people? As we talked, the prime minister and I came to the same conclusion: the center of the problem was simply the dark side of human nature.

While this book focuses on bridges between the Muslim East and Christian West, the issue at its core is humanity’s historic compulsion to be at war with itself. Our excuses for war are endless, but the truth is that war and conflict, division and mutual hostility need no more basis than the stubborn human tendency that is forever splitting our world into bitterly opposed camps. Whether Arab against Arab (Iraq), Christian against Christian (Northern Ireland), or Arab, Christian, and Jew against each other (Lebanon), it is at its core the same conflict. Beirut’s Green Line, Korea’s 38th Parallel, Germany’s Berlin Wall, the United States’ Mason-Dixon Line, and all the hundreds of thousands of similar partitions that we have erected throughout history and around the globe-they are all echoes of the same barren line of separation within the human heart, the same deadly misunderstanding.

In ancient Egypt, the heart was considered the seat of thought and emotion, and was the only organ not removed during mummification. The heart is mentioned in the Bible more than any other topic, and is discussed more than 150 times in the Qur’an.

“If we could just find a way to influence the human heart to love rather than to hate,” said my Somali friend, “then there may be hope for Somalia.”

Indeed, if we can find a way to do this, then there is hope for the rest of the world as well.

The concepts Jesus taught are as radical today as they were two thousand years ago, because they run counter to our divisive human nature-a nature that is perennially finding new Green Lines to create and then shooting across them at each other. It seems clear to me that these concepts represent the only hope of bridging the Muslim-Christian divide and subduing the shrill escalation of rhetoric, resentment and retribution between East and West. We know that most foreign ministries and formal diplomatic bodies (certainly including the U.S. Department of State) will not likely engage a policy of “loving” their enemies. But you and I can do exactly that.

How do we do this? What does this kind of love look like? Again, Paul’s first letter to his little community in Corinth provides a vivid picture of both what this kind of love is not (envious, boastful, proud, focused on its own agenda, readily provoked, always keeping a tally of the other’s wrongs, or relishing trouble and misfortune) and also what it is: patient, kind, truthful, protecting, trusting, hopeful, enduring, and finally, consistent and never-failing. I have witnessed first-hand how friendships based on these aspects of love can yield power beyond imagination, penetrating the hearts of even the most hardened despot.

Can we do this? Of course we can, and we must. The alternative is to do nothing and see our world consumed by an irrational maelstrom of hatred and violence.”