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There are those who might say the same thing about the Old Testament.

Well, Dick, I'm glad you [said that]. In the late bronze age, in the time of Moses, Joshua, and right up until King David, human societies apparently had not developed to the point that you could separate a spiritual, religious leadership on one hand from a secular, political leadership on the other. It was merged together.

They were theocracies.

Yes. But here's where a transition came. And the New Testament has been, I think, falsely blamed. 1 Chronicles 22:7-9 shows a change of God's policy. I believe the change was ordained by God because human societies had developed to a point where the change could be instituted and be understood by people.

When King David said, "I want to build the temple," God said, "No. You will not build my house. You have much blood on your hands. You have fought many wars in my sight. Your son Solomon is a man of peace. He will build my house."

One of the-one of the implications of what you're saying is that Judaism and Christianity have found ways of an elasticity in their-in their tradition to move into modernity.

Yes.

You're saying there's very little that you can build on in Islam that moves you to modernity. You pretty much have to betray the text to sustain an intellectual argument for modernity for moderate Muslims.

Yes. Let me give you an example. There is a moderate Muslim in Los Angeles, he's a professor of law at UCLA: Khaled Abou El Fadl. And he has a website in which he's trying to persuade radical Muslims to be moderate. There was a Los Angeles Times article about him, and I read it with great interest. He does not use quotes from the Qur'an to try to persuade radical Muslims to moderation. All he uses is, and I quote, "obscure text from the hadith." So trying to use text from the hadith—obscure ones at that—to stop the radicalism of many Muslims is like trying to slow down a hurricane by asking moths to beat their wings against the wind.

So you argue that if Muhammad returned today, he would support Osama bin Laden over moderates because he wanted the entire planet to place itself under submission to Allah.

Yes, absolutely. Now, everyone is right when they say that radical Muslims are a minority. But radical Muslims have hundreds of websites, and they are working vigorously and zealously to convert moderate Muslims to radicalism.

So why are there no opportunities for using redemptive analogy with Muslims?

Well, it happened because Muhammad had limited knowledge of the Old Testament and even less of the New Testament. But he was pretending that he had complete knowledge. So he kept getting the stories wrong. In the Qur'an, Muhammad tells the story of Moses' confrontation with Pharaoh, the Exodus story, 27 times in 89 chapters. There's not one mention of the Passover. He told the story of Gideon's 300, only it wasn't Gideon, it was King Saul.

Now, it was not until about 200 years after his death that Muslim leaders learned Latin. Some of them learned Greek. They could read the Vulgate Latin Bible or the Greek New Testament, and they began to see that there was a Passover in the Exodus story and our prophet didn't mention it. So they had to either admit that he was mistaken, he didn't really know what he was talking about, or the option was to blame the Jews for having tampered with the Scriptures, so that God had to use Muhammad to restore the Old Testament to its original form.

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February (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47