This is part three of a three-part series about a network of interfaith centers in the Muslim world. Click here to read parts one and two.
Last month, an obscure jihadist group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at the Mar Elias Greek Orthodox Church in Damascus, Syria, that killed 25 people. The attack came as a response, it stated, to the government requiring prior approval of Islamic preaching in the Christian neighborhood. Three months earlier, at the site of the future bombing, austere Salafi Muslims called on residents to convert to Islam, a practice known in Arabic as da’wa. Later, a car drove up and its occupants loudly repeated the call until local Muslims sent them away.
Salafis are known for growing long beards and wearing traditional robes in imitation of the prophet Muhammad. Salafi practice is not inherently violent, and reporting does not draw a clear connection between the incident at the church and the later suicide bombing. But many jihadists emerge from or are drawn to Salafi communities, as both aim to follow the Quran literally in complete devotion to Allah.
The jihadists even adopted a particular verse from the Quran as their slogan: “Fight the polytheists together as they fight together against you.” To them, belief in the Trinity is an offense against Allah’s oneness. In preventing Muslims from proper da’wa, then, both state and church in Syria became worthy of war.
Some experts say Salafis and jihadists represent a reaction—peaceful or otherwise—to reclaim a lost idealized era when Islam governed much of the world. Yet most Muslims are neither Salafis nor jihadists; many have accepted democracy and the nation-state system that formally adopts principles of minority rights and common citizenship.
Still, according to a 2013 survey of Muslims in 38 nations, the sense of Islamic superiority lingers. Like many evangelicals, the most devout Muslims view their faith as the only way to heaven and consider converting others to be a religious duty.
In the West, belief that someone is going to hell has little civic impact, as religious faith tends to be an individual decision. But in the Muslim world, this belief has subjected Christians to a long heritage of second-class citizenship. And the survey reveals that substantial minorities of the most devout want sharia made the law of the land, applied also to non-Muslims.
The modern principle of pluralism holds two ideas in tension: Believers should be free to spread their faith, while minority religions and their beliefs should be respected. As Syria shows, this can be complicated in the Middle East, where the understanding of Islam is a crucial factor for interfaith peace.
One Tunisian Muslim academic, Adnane Mokrani, makes a bold assertion: Islam, when properly understood, is an ally of religious pluralism. Though he concedes this is a minority viewpoint among Muslims, Mokrani, who serves on the Network of Centers for Christian-Muslim Relations advisory board, said that a new generation of theologians are reevaluating the Quran’s understanding of diversity.
The new network, profiled previously this series, doesn’t comment on political events or policies. It recognizes the witness of one’s faith as an essential part of both Christianity and Islam. But it believes that interfaith peace may require setting aside evangelism and da’wa in certain ways and places, though not as an activity of individual believers.
In this case, Mokrani believes the diversity of religions flows intentionally from the divine will, expressing his argument in a recent webinar. He cited this verse from the Quran as evidence: “If Allah had willed, He would have made you one community.” This idea is similar to that of the academic sage in the first article in this series, who lamented the state of conflict and rancor that ensues from religious difference. Yet the passage continues optimistically: Multiple religious communities exist so that they may “compete with one another in doing good.”
Classical Muslim theology, however, divides the world into the “House of Islam” and the “House of War,” as multiple verses in the Quran encourage Muslims to fight unbelievers. Historically, the House of War was the realm of opposing empires, with the Christian Byzantines the most stubborn in resistance.
This theology recognized that Jews and Christians in conquered lands now resided within the House of Islam. The Quran refers to Jews and Christians, along with Muslims, as “People of the Book,” in recognition of a shared scriptural heritage, Mokrani said. Classical Muslim scholars rejected much of the Bible’s content as distorted. Yet the Quran honors its conception of the Torah, given to Moses, and the Gospel, given to Jesus, as “containing guidance and light”—the same terms it uses of itself.
On the ground, this meant that Muslims would not forcibly convert Jews and Christians. Instead, the two religious groups could continue practicing their faiths in exchange for payment of a tax called jizya. Through this, these communities received status as dhimmis, safe from war and given freedom of worship—though not to evangelize. Treatment varied over time, but their second-class status reinforced the Islamic sense of religious superiority.
The historical development of Muslim society led to a gap between the original conciliatory vision of Muhammad and the later, more rigid attitude of scholars, maintains Mokrani, who is also professor of Islamic studies at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. Faced with a growing empire and Christian opposition in war and faith, Muslim scholars’ commentaries on the Quran polemically defined Islam as a religious community distinct from Jews and Christians rather than in continuity with them.
Their interpretive tool was the location of Muhammad’s prophecies.
In Mecca, the prophet preached on monotheism and morality, focusing on the Final Judgment. He spoke positively about Jews and Christians, calling his polytheistic tribesmen to repentance. Eventually, though, Muhammad fled north to nearby Medina, where the people accepted him as a political leader focused on governing. And here, his rupture with the Jews and armed skirmishes with Christians on the outskirts of the Byzantine Empire forced later scholars to interpret the differences between Mecca and Medina revelations.
From there, the principle of abrogation emerged, evident from passages eventually forbidding alcohol and shifting the direction of prayer from Jerusalem to Mecca. Since the Quran stated that Allah could “replace a verse with another,” scholars followed the pattern to prioritize latter revelation over earlier passages. And the commentaries they wrote increasingly limited the application of broadly worded verses.
An important example—crucial for religious pluralism—comes from a verse declaring, “Let there be no compulsion in religion.” Omaima Abou-Bakr, a professor at Cairo University in Egypt, examined centuries of commentaries for her chapter in Freedom of Expression in Islam: Challenging Apostasy and Blasphemy Laws. One early commentator qualified the plain meaning of “no compulsion” by linking it to another verse establishing the jizya tax. Later, another cited verses demonstrating the necessity of combat and related a traditional saying of Muhammad that praised the idea of captives of war entering paradise in chains—that is, accepting Islam after their military defeat.
Other early commentators linked instead to verses emphasizing, “Whoever wills let them believe [or] disbelieve.” But Abou-Bakr wrote that hundreds of years passed before another major commentary in the 19th century connected the “no compulsion” passage to tolerant verses about non-Muslims. By then, the world had changed, as European colonialism entered the House of Islam and shattered its civilizational sense of superiority. Muslims were now on the defensive, having to address accusations that their religion spread by the sword.
Mokrani highlighted other examples of tolerant verses. Not only does the Quran commend its conception of the Torah and the Gospel, but it also calls Jews and Christians to follow their own Scripture. If they do, Allah declared they will have “no fear” on the Day of Judgment, “nor will they grieve.”
“The only conversion required is to God,” Mokrani said.
This passage about the People of the Book also stresses the importance of the Quran to Jewish and Christian communities. But it comes, Mokrani emphasized, from the later Medina period of Muhammad’s ministry. So does the verse about the divine will for pluralism—that Allah could have formed “one community” if he had wanted to.
Mokrani’s argument that these passages are not abrogated runs into potential difficulty, however, considering what many scholars believe to be one of the final verses revealed in the Quran: “Certainly, Allah’s only Way [translated literally as “religion”] is Islam,” while a later verse in the passage says those who follow other ways “will be among the losers.” Still, rejection of this religion is met only with the promise of hellfire, and Muhammad is told “your duty is only to deliver the message.”
But Mokrani said the Quran’s emphasis on religious communities, not religions, yields a significant clue in how to understand what the “Islam” of this passage actually stands for.
The idea begins in recognizing that Arabic contains no system of uppercase and lowercase letters. Muslims have traditionally stated that the Quran can truly be understood only in its original language, compared to Christians who have eagerly translated the Bible. To that end, Muslims usually craft titles like The Meaning of the Glorious Quran, or something similar, when publishing translations of their holy text.
All translators must make choices. Mokrani highlighted the verse in which Jesus’ disciples confess their belief in Allah: “Bear witness that we have submitted.” This is the rendering at quran.com, and all quotations in this article are drawn from the popular internet site. In other translations, however, the disciples “testify that we are Muslims.”
To Christians, this is clearly an anachronism. Islam did not exist at the time of Jesus. Yet many Muslims maintain that Allah’s religion—as the verse above states—was always Islam. The Arabic word islam means “submission,” and this is what Allah requires. In the majority Muslim view, Jews were required to submit to the Torah and Christians to the Gospel, but now all people must submit to the Quran.
In English, “Islam” is capitalized as the name of a religion. This is a legitimate translation, as the Arabic islam is preceded by the definite article. But Mokrani said that the Quran never refers to Judaism, Christianity, or other faiths as religions; it therefore does not follow that “Islam” is a religion either. Instead, Allah addresses religious communities—Jews, Christians, and the people of Muhammad, muslimuun in Arabic, meaning “those who submit.” According to Mokrani’s exegesis, any within these communities who submit to Allah through their respective scriptures will be saved.
Does this pluralism only include the People of the Book? Not necessarily, he maintained. Another verse includes other regional religious communities present at the time of Muhammad’s preaching, and even polytheists, saying that “Allah will judge between them all on Judgment Day.” In this verse, Mokrani points out, salvation is promised to none, but neither is the possibility denied.
Scholars consider this chapter of the Quran as partially from Mecca, partially from Medina. A later verse puts polytheists clearly in hell. Muslims generally follow the principle of abrogation, and jihadists in Syria not only expand the meaning of polytheism but also apply it violently.
But why, Mokrani asks, should Muslims prioritize the later particular verses of the Quran over the earlier universal verses? In his chapter of The Study Qurʾan, Walid Saleh wrote that much of what Muslims believe is more from the commentaries on the text and less from the text itself.
Sources referred to in this article are interpreting their faith in an era of widely esteemed religious diversity. Mokrani and Abou-Bakr admit theirs is a minority viewpoint—though their human task is the same as that of the commentators from an era of Muslim conquest.
“But now there are many voices,” Mokrani said, “taking the same direction of pluralism.”
