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Theological Perspectives

Fundamentalism

My mother begins her study of theological perspectives by mentioning fundamentalism. I do not think it useful, however, to begin a discussion on Islam with some vague reference to this phenomenon. While fundamentalism may be common to Judaism, Christianity and Islam (and Hinduism, Sikhism, etc.), I would argue that what is meant in each case is actually very different. In the Christian context it is generally used to signify conservative Protestantism characterised by a literal interpretation of the Bible as God’s unadulterated word. In the case of Islam, by contrast, all Muslims believe the Qur’an to be the word of God, but the term fundamentalist is not generally used in this sense. Instead, fundamentalism when speaking of Muslims is more often aligned with ideas of extreme militancy, although this wholly depends upon who is using the label. From within, those whom a non-practising Muslim may label fundamentalists could be labelled puritans, modernists or whatever by others quite happy to reclaim the thus far negative term for themselves, as meaning those who adhere to the fundamentals of the religion.

In other words, what is meant by fundamentalism has to be specified from the outset. To align Muslim fundamentalism with the view held by conservative Protestantism would clearly negate James Barr’s view of it by default, for it is then not a reaction against other forces, but merely accepted dogma. Only in its more common usage, of meaning reactionary militancy, would the definition fit. This illustrates the problem of using one term for very different circumstances. My mother writes,

Whereas this manifests itself in Christianity mainly through a particular approach to the Bible, Islam has demonstrated the emergence of coercive ideologies resulting in detailed legislation concerning every aspect of personal and social life.

I feel that this is incorrect. The reason it manifests itself in Christianity in one way and in Islam in another is because the term is used in one context to mean one thing and in another to mean something quite different. So we are left to chasing our tails as to what we really mean by this term and, as a result, fail to reach any meaningful conclusions. What we need to do is take one definition (at a time, at least) and stick to it.

For the sake of argument, let us define fundamentalism by using Hugh Goddard’s third criterion as quoted in my mother’s essay, ‘the conviction that the authentic version of their faith is to be found in the earliest period therefore an emphasis on a return to “fundamentals”’ (Hugh Goddard, Fundamentalism, p. 148). I feel this best describes the common ground for the term when used for both religions. The first question we must address is whether there is something wrong with fundamentalism. In general fundamentalism is viewed as a deeply negative force, hence, perhaps, the question, ‘Is Islam a fundamentalist religion?’

I would argue that a return to the fundamentals of a religion and, therefore, to its earliest history should be the starting point of any dialogue between faiths. This definition of fundamentalism implies a study of history, which in my view is something positive. To become ahistorical implies a denial of the most important aspects of one’s belief, i.e. its origins and primal teachings. Last Christmas, I listened to an Anglican Bishop on the radio say that the historical figure of Jesus was not really important; what mattered, he argued, was what Jesus meant to Christians today. This view is in fact illogical for if, as Muslims contend, Jesus was actually a Prophet calling his people to the worship of one God, to then worship him as God would be to go against his teaching. Similarly and by extension, if as Christians hold he may be taken as an object of worship, then to deny his alleged divinity would also be of consequence. In other words, the historical person of Jesus is of great importance. Sadly, this position, that the figure of Jesus in faith is more important than in history, appears to be a view held quite widely amongst contemporary Christian theologians:

During the past thirty years theologians have come increasingly to admit that it is no longer possible to write a biography of Jesus, since documents earlier than the gospels tell us next to nothing of his life, while the gospels present the ‘Kerygma’ or proclamation of faith, not the Jesus of history. (G.A. Wells, Did Jesus Exist? p.1)

At one extreme, the peripheral writings of John Hick in The Metaphor of God Incarnate seem to me to make a mockery of the notion that there is a religious Truth. If faith becomes merely what we make it, how does that help us? If Jesus himself did not teach that he was God incarnate dying for the sins of the world, as Hick argues, isn’t the idea that divine incarnation should be understood merely as a metaphor simply another way of saying, ‘It doesn’t matter what he taught; I wish to believe this.’ While many theologians reject Hick’s thesis, their writings follow a similar pattern. It is in this light that I would argue in favour of fundamentalism in accordance with the definition I chose above. To follow our teachers, be it Jesus in the case of Christianity or Muhammad in the case of Islam, we need to know what they themselves actually taught.

It could be argued, however, that the reason fundamentalism is often frowned upon from within certain Christian circles is exactly because constructing a picture of the historical reality is so difficult as a result of the paucity of source material. It is a fact, after all, that this material is limited pretty much to the four gospels contained within the New Testament. Two references in the writings of Josephus to the life of Jesus are now considered later Christian interpolations. Having said that, it is true that there are those who look to the apocryphal writings of the Church, as well as the more recently discovered Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hamadi Library as a further source. Indeed, there has been a move on the part of Vatican scholars to include some material from the Dead Sea Scrolls in the New Testament, as reported by The Guardian on the 11th of September 2001:

Vatican scholars are preparing to rewrite the Bible by incorporating revelations contained in ancient scrolls discovered beside the Dead Sea in Palestine, it emerged yesterday. … Martyn Percy, a canon doctor at Sheffield University, welcomed the initiative but suggested the results may be less than dramatic. “There has never been a settled, definitive version of the Bible; it has been an evolving book which has gone through many translations. Only fundamentalists think it came in a fax from heaven.” (R. Carroll, Vatican scholars prepare to rewrite Bible)

Despite this, the main focus of study makes it is easier to appreciate the position taken by modern theologians on the figure of Jesus. That view of John Stott that each gospel was written to present a different face of Christ highlights a problem we have. If these primary sources themselves were written with the intention of converting non-Christians and strengthening the faith of believers, the biographer of Jesus’ life is faced with an absence of material which the original authors thought unimportant in their attempt to convey a particular story. The result being that if we were to collect all the words actually spoken by Jesus in the four Gospels, removing those passages duplicated across the different books, we would find that they would fit on no more than two sides of a sheet of A4 paper. Given the impact Jesus has had on the life of countless generations of Christians, this is a woefully small amount of information. In the introduction to his book The Parables of Jesus, Robert Funk writes:

So far as I have been able to discover, no one had ever compiled a list of all the words attributed to Jesus in the first three hundred years following his death. … Among the many scholarly books written on Jesus in the last century and more … I could find no critical list of his sayings and deeds. (p.xi)

The scarcity of information means that we are not even sure of the most basic questions about Jesus’ life. The gospels do not tell us what language he spoke with the result that Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Syriac and a Galilaean dialect of Chaldic have all been suggested by scholars as possibilities. The gospels fail to teach us any of the doctrines later adopted by the Church, such as the early Eastern Creeds Epistola Apostolorum, The Old Creed of Alexandria, The Shorter Creed of the Egyptian Church Order, The Marcosian Creed, The Early Creed of Africa, The Profession of the ‘Presbyters’ at Smyrna (F.J. Badcock, The History of the Creeds, p.24) and, of course, the later Nicene Creed which was forty-one lines longer than the first. Nor do the gospels help us to understand that Palestine at the time was under Roman occupation. More importantly, the gospels do not tell us anything about the authors of the books; we are merely provided with first names and are then left to guess their relationship to Jesus, whether they were eyewitnesses to the events of his life, whether they were known for their honesty and what their role in the early Church was. The seasoned argument that the four gospels prove to be reliable witnesses by virtue of the fact that they agree on the main points but differ on a few of the details, pointing to the fact that the authors did not collude in their accounts is unsurprisingly not supported by many biblical scholars. Evidence of copying from Mark is brought out by some, whilst others argue for the existence of an earlier primal document which they label Q.

Burton Mack argues in The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q & Christian Origins, that Jesus’ earliest followers had collected his teachings, ideas, manners and calls for social reform in a book which predated the development of the gospels. In his view this text developed in layers. First there were the sayings of Jesus divorced from any idea that he had brought a new religion (p.73-80). Later, a more sectarian attitude becomes apparent (p.131). Finally, with the Roman destruction of the Second Temple, Jesus is described as the Son of God (p.173-4). At the close of the first century, he argues, the authors of the synoptic gospels used Q in the process of writing their accounts of the life of Jesus. Although the theory of Q is based on critical analysis of the text of the extant gospels, it remains a speculative notion, there having been no discovery of an actual text.

When it comes to a comparison with the recording of the Qur’an and the collected sayings of Prophet Muhammad there is a noticeable difference. The Qur’an itself is considered a Book sent down with the Prophet, rather than a description of his life as in the case of the gospels, and is thus not compared with the New Testament. In terms of substance, the collected sayings of the Prophet could more easily be equated with the gospels, although the method by which they were collected does not compare. If we consider that the earliest gospels are thought to have been written during the latter part of the first century, it is notable that the Muslim community during the lifetime of Muhammad himself was concerned with documenting and committing to memory every verse of the Qur’an. In their midst, the Prophet dictated, explained and arranged every verse of the Qur’an and, following his death, his community took it upon itself to continue to preserve it from corruption.

The reason that the Muslim community felt it so important to preserve it was that the Qur’an itself stated that the previous scriptures had been corrupted from within. Fearing that people would treat this revelation in the same manner they devised means by which to protect it. So successful were they that today you will hear other Muslims who have learnt the Qur’an correcting the leader of the prayer, in which it is always recited, if he happens to make a mistake during his recital. The millions of Muslims who have committed the whole of the Qur’an to memory stand as the first line of its defence, but certainly not its last. In order to preserve both the Qur’an and the stories of the Prophet’s life, his community established an elaborate structure based on the law of witness to diminish the risks usually encountered when passing information on.

During the lifetime of the Prophet, his companions would relate his words and actions to one another by saying, ‘The Prophet said/did such and such.’ When such a report was mentioned to a further person the source would be related along with what was said or done: ‘Aisha said the Prophet said such and such.’ As time passed by, the scholars of Islam insisted on carefully examining the source of all information which they received so that, by the end of the first century of the Muslim calendar, the practice had become a science in its own right. For a report to be accepted, scholars demanded that four conditions be met: that it was accurate, that all narrators in the chain of narration were trustworthy, that the chain of transmission was unbroken and that there was positive support for the statement from all other available evidence.

During the second half of the first century of the Muslim calendar, the sayings of the Prophet began to be categorised by subject in booklets. Again the Muslim scholars considered it necessary to establish a means of protecting the content of these books from possible adulteration. They therefore required any scholar involved in passing on sayings of the Prophet to be in direct contact with the person to whom they were being passed. So insistent were they on the role of witness, that they considered the use of a book without hearing it from the author tantamount to giving false evidence. One could not contemplate adaptations such as those currently been undertaken by Vatican scholars in respect to the gospels or the ninth century addition of the story of adulteress woman in John’s gospel. A personal commentary added to a book had to be signed, or else it would be considered to invalidate the text. Rigorous controls were instated even when it came to using books of the sayings of the Prophet, where reading certificates which amounted to licences were mandatory. When transmitting such books, a detailed record of the attendance at the gathering was taken and added to the reading certificate, which then became an exclusive authorization for those listed in it to read, teach, copy or quote from that book. Other checks were also employed to ensure that sacred knowledge was preserved in a suitably respectful manner.

The point of all this is to show why I believe fundamentalism, or a return to the earliest period, need not be a troublesome issue. The insistence of scholars on preserving knowledge in the case of Islam, however, makes such a return much more realistic than it would be given the Christian’s situation. Surely if we claim to follow Jesus and Muhammad, we need to know what they themselves taught. By default this would mean going back to the source. If our inter-faith dialogue is genuinely concerned with faith, rather than contemporary politics, then I would argue that a study of history, of belief, doctrine and theology is of crucial importance. We cannot throw around slogans about fundamentalism and tolerance and then expect that this will contribute to our mutual understanding.

While Muslims need to develop an appreciation of why Christian theology has developed in the way it has, there always remains the urge to pursue the historical reality. It is, I believe, because Islam speaks specifically about the role of Jesus that this situation arises. Historical reality may not, for example, be an issue for a Hindu whose sacred texts have nothing to say about Jesus. For Muslims, however, Jesus is explicitly referred to as a Prophet sent to the tribe of Israel to bring them back to the essence of the Law of Moses. The Qur’an categorically denies that he is the son of God and, furthermore, states that all an individual need do for the eradication of sin is pray to God for forgiveness. Because Islam makes this claim, the Muslim naturally finds himself asking for proof of the Christian position, that Jesus taught the idea of divine son-ship; hence the emphasis on the earliest period.

I believe Muslim-Christian dialogue needs to confront this issue head on. Muslims and Christians need to explain what they believe and why they believe what they do, to promote mutual understanding. Becoming ahistorical and launching instead into debates about how much more tolerant contemporary Christianity is than Islam cannot serve our needs because, at the end of the day, we still do not appreciate why we each believe what we do. The latter is, furthermore, a highly reductive view of our affairs. It is notable, for example, that when speaking of Islam, any place in the world may be used as a model, whereas in the case of Christianity it seems that a very specific, regionalised (and contemporary) form serves as the point of reference. Khokhar’s story of his conversion to Christianity from Islam, for example, is distinguished from the experience of a Muslim convert from Anglican Christianity. Replace that form of Christianity with Serbian or Ethiopian Orthodoxy, or indeed Irish Roman Catholicism as in the case of one of our friends, and the delineation is not so clear. Failing to grasp the importance of the historical persons we follow would seem to imply that we have not really thought properly about the purpose of dialogue.