The Trinity: A Muslim perspective
by Abdal-Hakim Murad
A
number of difficulties will beset any presentation of Muslim understandings of
the Trinity. Not the least of these is the fact that these Muslim
understandings have been almost as diverse and as numerous as those obtaining
among Christian scholars themselves. It is true that medieval Islam knew much
more about Christian doctrine than the doctors of the Church did about Islam,
for the obvious reason that Muslim societies contained literate minorities with
whom one could debate, something which was normally not the case in
Christendom.
Muslim-Christian dialogue, a novelty in the West, has a long
history in the Middle East, going back at least as far as the polite debates
between St John of Damascus and the Muslim scholars of seventh-century Syria.
And yet reading our theologians one usually concludes that most of them never
quite ‘got’ the point about the Trinity. Their analysis can usually be faulted
on grounds not of unsophistication, but of insufficient familiarity with the
complexities of Scholastic or Eastern Trinitarian thinking. Often they merely
tilt at windmills.
There
were, I think, two reasons for this. Firstly, the doctrine of Trinity was the
most notorious point at issue between Christianity and Islam, and hence was
freighted with fierce passions. For the pre-modern Muslim mind, Christian
invaders, crusaders, inquisitors and the rest were primarily obsessed with
forcing the doctrine of Trinity on their hapless Muslim enemies.
It is recalled
even today among Muslims in Russia that when Ivan the Terrible captured Kazan,
capital of the Volga Muslims, he told its people that they could escape the
sword by ‘praising with us the Most Blessed Trinity for generation unto
generation.’ Even today in Bosnia, Serb irregulars use the three-fingered
Trinity salute as a gesture of defiance against their Muslim enemies. And so
on. Much Muslim theologising about the Trinity has hence been set in a bitterly
polemical context of fear and often outright hatred: the Trinity as the very
symbol of the unknown but violent other lurking on the barbarous northern
shores of the Mediterranean, scene of every kind of demonic wickedness and
cruelty.
To
this distortion one has to add, I think, some problems posed by the doctrine of
the Trinity itself. Islam, while it has produced great thinkers, has
nonetheless put fewer of its epistemological eggs in the theological basket
than has Christianity. Reading Muslim presentations of the Trinity one cannot
help but detect a sense of impatience. One of the virtues of the Semitic type of
consciousness is the conviction that ultimate reality must be ultimately
simple, and that the Nicene talk of a deity with three persons, one of whom has
two natures, but who are all somehow reducible to authentic unity, quite apart
from being rationally dubious, seems intuitively wrong. God, the final ground
of all being, surely does not need to be so complicated.
These
two obstacles to a correct understanding of the Trinity do to some extent
persist even today. But a new obstacle has in the past century or so presented
itself inasmuch as the old Western Christian consensus on what the Trinity
meant, which was always a fragile consensus, no longer seems to obtain among
many serious Christian scholars. Surveying the astonishing bulk and vigour of
Christian theological output, Muslims can find it difficult to know precisely
how most Christians understand the Trinity. It is also our experience that
Christians are usually keener to debate other topics; and we tend to conclude
that this is because they themselves are uncomfortable with aspects of their
Trinitarian theology.
What
I will try to do, then, is to set out my own understanding, as a Muslim, of the
Trinitarian doctrine. I would start by making the obvious point that I
recognise that a lot is at stake here for historic Christian orthodoxy. The
fundamental doctrine of Trinity makes no sense unless the doctrines of
incarnation and atonement are also accepted. St Anselm, in his Cur Deus Homo,
showed that the concept of atonement demanded that Christ had to be God, since
only an infinite sacrifice could atone for the limitless evil of humanity,
which was, in Augustine’s words, a massa damnata – a damned mass because of
Adam’s original sin. Jesus of Nazareth was hence God incarnate walking on
earth, distinct from God the Father dwelling in heaven and hearing our prayers.
It thus became necessary to think of God as at least two in one, who were at
least for a while existing in heaven and on earth, as distinct entities. In
early Christianity, the Logos which was the Christ-spirit believed to be active
as a divine presence in human life, in time became hypostatized as a third
person, and so the Trinity was born. No doubt this process was shaped by the
triadic beliefs which hovered in the Near Eastern air of the time, many of
which included the belief in a divine atonement figure.
Now,
looking at the evidence for this process, I have to confess I am not a Biblical
scholar, armed with the dazzling array of philological qualifications deployed
by so many others. But it does seem to me that a consensus has been emerging
among serious historians, pre-eminent among whom are figures such as Professor
Geza Vermes of Oxford, that Jesus of Nazareth himself never believed, or
taught, that he was the second person of a divine trinity.
We know that he was
intensely conscious of God as a divine and loving Father, and that he dedicated
his ministry to proclaiming the imminence of God’s kingdom, and to explaining
how human creatures could transform themselves in preparation for that momentous
time. He believed himself to be the Messiah, and the ‘son of man’ foretold by
the prophets. We know from the study of first-century Judaism, recently made
accessible by the Qumran discoveries, that neither of these terms would have
been understood as implying divinity: they merely denoted purified servants of
God.
The
term ‘son of God’, frequently invoked in patristic and medieval thinking to
prop up the doctrine of Jesus’s divinity, was in fact similarly unpersuasive:
in the Old Testament and in wider Near Eastern usage it can be applied to
kings, pharaohs, miracle workers and others. Yet when St Paul carried his
version of the Christian message beyond Jewish boundaries into the wider
gentile world, this image of Christ’s sonship was interpreted not
metaphorically, but metaphysically.
The resultant tale of controversies,
anathemas and political interventions is complex; but what is clear is that the
Hellenised Christ, who in one nature was of one substance with God, and in
another nature was of one substance with humanity, bore no significant
resemblance to the ascetic prophet who had walked the roads of Galilee some
three centuries before.
From
the Muslim viewpoint, this desemiticising of Jesus was a catastrophe. Three
centuries after Nicea, the Quran stated:
‘The
Messiah, son of Mary, was no other than a messenger, messengers the like of
whom had passed away before him . . . O people of the Book – stress not in your
religion other than the truth, and follow not the vain desires of a people who
went astray before you.’ (Surat al-Ma’ida, 75)
And
again:
‘O
people of the Scripture! Do not exaggerate in your religion, nor utter anything
concerning God save the truth. The Messiah, Jesus son of Mary, was only a
messenger of God, and His word which He conveyed unto Mary, and a spirit from
Him. So believe in God and His messengers, and do not say ‘Three’. Desist, it
will be better for you. God is only One God. . . . The Messiah would never have
scorned to be a slave of God.’ (Surat al-Nisa, 171-2)
The
Qur’anic term for ‘exaggeration’ used here, ghuluww, became a standard term in
Muslim heresiography for any tendency, Muslim or otherwise, which attributed
divinity to a revered and charismatic figure. We are told that during the life
of the Prophet’s son-in-law Ali, a few of his devoted followers from Iraq, where
Hellenistic and pagan cultures formed the background of many converts,
described him as God, or the vehicle of a Divine incarnation – hulul.
The claim
of course irritated Ali profoundly, and he banished those who made it from his
sight; but even today marginal Islamic sectaries like the Kizilbash of Turkey,
or the Alawites of the Syrian mountains, maintain an esoteric cosmology which
asserts that God became incarnate in Ali, and then in the succession of Imams
who descended from him.
Mainstream
Islam, however, despite its rapid spread over non-Semitic populations, never
succumbed to this temptation. The best-known of all devotional poems about the
Blessed Prophet Muhammad: the famous Mantle Ode of al-Busairi, defines the
frontier of acceptable veneration:
‘Renounce
what the Christians claim concerning their prophet,
Then
praise him as you will, and with all your heart.
For
although he was of human nature,
He
was the best of humanity without exception.’
A
few years previously, the twelfth-century theologian Al-Ghazali had summed up
the dangers of ghuluww when he wrote that the Christians had been so dazzled by
the divine light reflected in the mirror like heart of Jesus, that they mistook
the mirror for the light itself, and worshipped it. But what was happening to
Jesus was not categorically distinct from what happened, and may continue to
happen, to any purified human soul that has attained the rank of sainthood. The
presence of divine light in Jesus’ heart does not logically entail a doctrine
of Jesus’ primordial existence as a hypostasis in a divine trinity.
There
are other implications of Trinitarian doctrine which concern Muslims. Perhaps
one should briefly mention our worries about the doctrine of Atonement, which
implies that God is only capable of really forgiving us when Jesus has borne
our just punishment by dying on the cross. John Hick has remarked that ‘a
forgiveness that has to be bought by full payment of the moral debt is not in
fact forgiveness at all.’ More coherent, surely, is the teaching of Jesus
himself in the parable of the prodigal son, who is fully forgiven by his father
despite the absence of a blood sacrifice to appease his sense of justice. The
Lord’s Prayer, that superb petition for forgiveness, nowhere implies the need
for atonement or redemption.
Jesus’
own doctrine of God’s forgiveness as recorded in the Gospels is in fact
entirely intelligible in terms of Old Testament and Islamic conceptions. ‘God
can forgive all sins’, says the Quran. And in a well-known hadith of the Prophet
we are told:
On
the Day of Judgement, a herald angel shall cry out [God’s word] from beneath
the Throne, saying: ‘O nation of Muhammad! All that was due to me from you I
forgive you now, and only the rights which you owed one another remain. Thus
forgive one another, and enter Heaven through My Mercy.’
And
in a famous incident:
It
is related that a boy was standing under the sun on a hot summer’s day. He was
seen by a woman concealed among the people, who made her way forwards
vigorously until she took up the child and clutched him to her breast. Then she
turned her back to the valley to keep the heat away from him, saying, ‘My son!
My son!’ At this the people wept, and were distracted from everything that they
were doing.
Then the Messenger of God, upon whom be peace, came up. They told
him of what had happened, when he was delighted to see their compassion. Then
he gave them glad news, saying: ‘Marvel you at this woman’s compassion for her
son?’ and they said that they did. And he declared, ‘Truly, the Exalted God
shall be even more compassionate towards you than is this woman towards her
son.’ At this, the Muslims went their ways in the greatest rapture and joy.
This
same hadith presents an interesting feature of Muslim assumptions about the
divine forgiveness: its apparently ‘maternal’ aspect. The term for the
Compassionate and Loving God used in these reports, al-Rahman, was said by the
Prophet himself to derive from Rahim, meaning a womb. Some recent Muslim
reflection has seen in this, more or less rightly I think, a reminder that God
has attributes which may metaphorically be associated with a ‘feminine,
maternal’ character, as well as the more ‘masculine’ predicates such as
strength and implacable justice. This point is just beginning to be picked up
by our theologians. There is not time to explore the matter fully, but there is
a definite and interesting convergence between the Christology of feminist
theologians such as Rosemary Reuther, and that of Muslims.
In
a recent work, the Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf reaffirms the orthodox
belief that God transcends gender, and cannot be spoken of as male or female,
although His attributes manifest either male or female properties, with neither
appearing to be preponderant. This gender-neutral understanding of the Godhead
has figured largely in Karen Armstrong’s various appreciations of Islam, and is
beginning to be realised by other feminist thinkers as well. For instance,
Maura O’Neill in a recent book observes that ‘Muslims do not use a masculine
God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in the construction of gender
roles.’
One
of Reuther’s own main objections to the Trinity, apart from its historically
and Biblically sketchy foundations, is its emphatic attribution of masculine
gender to God. She may or may not be exaggerating when she blames this
attribution for the indignities suffered by Christian women down the ages. But
she is surely being reasonable when she suggests that the male-dominated Trinity
is marginalising to women, as it suggests that it was man who was made in the
image of God, with woman as a revised and less theomorphic model of himself.
Partly
under her influence, American Protestant liturgy has increasingly tried to
de-masculinise the Trinity. Inclusive language lectionaries now refer to God as
‘Father and Mother’. The word for Christ’s relationship to God is now not ‘son’
but ‘child’. And so on, often to the point of absurdity or straightforward
doctrinal mutilation.
Here
in Britain, the feminist bull was grasped by the horns when the BCC Study
Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today issued its report in 1989. The
Commission’s response here was as follows:
‘The
word Father is to be construed apophatically, that is, by means of a determined
‘thinking away’ of the inappropriate – and in this context that means masculine
– connotations of the term. What will remain will be an orientation to
personhood, to being in relation involving origination in a personal sense, not
maleness.’
Now,
one has to say that this is unsatisfactory. The concept of fatherhood, stripped
of everything which has male associations, is not fatherhood at all. It is not
even parenthood, since parenthood has only two modalities. The Commissioners
are simply engaging in the latest exegetical manoeuvres required by the
impossible Trinitarian doctrine, which are, as John Biddle, the father of
Unitarianism put it, ‘fitter for conjurers than for Christians.’
The
final point that occurs to me is that the Trinity, mapped out in awesome detail
in the several volumes devoted to it by Aquinas, attempts to presume too much
about the inner nature of God. I mentioned earlier that Islam has historically
been more sceptical of philosophical theology as a path to God than has Christianity,
and in fact the divine unity has been affirmed by Muslims on the basis of two
supra-rational sources: the revelation of the Quran, and the unitive experience
of the mystics and the saints. That God is ultimately One, and indivisible, is
the conclusion of all higher mysticism, and Islam, as a religion of the divine
unity par excellence, has linked faith with mystical experience very closely.
An eighteenth century Bosnian mystic, Hasan Kaimi, expressed this in a poem
which even today is chanted and loved by the people of Sarajevo:
O
seeker of truth, it is your heart’s eye you must open.
Know
the Divine Unity today, through the path of love for Him.
If
you object: ‘I am waiting for my mind to grasp His nature’,
Know
the Divine Unity today, through the path of love for Him.
Should
you wish to behold the visage of God,
Surrender
to Him, and invoke His names,
When
your soul is clear a light of true joy shall shine.
Know
the Divine Unity today, through the path of love for Him. (HSH)
Sources:
1. Masud.co.uk
2. http://muslimvillage.com/
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