Yunus' summary: classical Islamic theology has it that human beings are by default "saved" (ie we have spiritual success in this world and the next) by virtue of the pure creation, al-fitra. Punishment in the next world (Gehenna) is a result of active rejection of the pure creation. This is not contemporary white-washing or New Age nice-nice but was explicated by serious-minded medieval gentlemen from Qur'an and hadith. The value of prophetic religion and the successive renewals in the messages of the various prophets, peace be upon them, is shoring up consciousness of the fitra and emphasizing what needs to be done to not be overcome by the illusion of the dense world.
...Even though it conserves the Muslim scriptural assurance of the naskh [abrogation]
of the earlier messages, this model of non-categoric supersesion may
serve to obviate one of the hazards of supersessionist theologies
which pluralists most frequently cite, namely the sin of arrogance.
The Ghazalian perspective shifts much of the burden of accountability
from the shoulders of the unreached, here generously defined, to set
it upon the shoulders of Muslim believers, creating the humbling
possibility that a *bien-peasant* Muslim may be passed over for falah
in favour of his non-Muslim neighbour. Supersessionism thus has
negative implications for dialouge only when read as a cause for
triumpalism, rather than as a spur to the contrite awareness of a
heavy responsibility. Triumpalism, moreover, seems scarcely feasible
as a contempory attitude given the collapse of Islam's erstwhile
position of global domination. Even the Dome of the Rock has become
an ambiguous sign.'
selected excerpts from' The Last Trump Card-Islam and the
Supersession of Other Faiths, Tim J.Winter, studies in interreligious
dialouge 9(1999)2
*salvation*:
'Verily We have a raised in every nation a messenger proclaiming,
Serve God, and shun false gods'(16:36) and
'there has never been a nation among whom a warner has not
passed'(35:24)
And a Hadith even specifies the number of God's prophets, who have
numbered no fewer than a hundred and twenty-four thousand, from Adam
down to and including Muhammad(Haythami).
' This understanding of an expansive divine strategy for human
*salvation*, or more precisely, what the less dramatic Koranic
soteriology, which lacks the doctrine of an original sin, understands
as *harvesting* or *success* (falah), has obvious implications. The
Koranic perspective, affirmed and eleborated in classical exegesis,
appears to be that there is no scandal either of particularity or of
multiple religions; there is, in reality, a single religion (al-din),
of which the various present-day faiths are the remnants and
offshoots. And because the grace mediated by the word made Book
operates non-redemptively, and because scriptures have been *sent
down* before, the new divine initiative is not construed as absolute
or categoric in its displacement of what preceded, given that no new
type of relationship between humanity and God is proposed. For Islam,
then, pre-Koranic history is not mere pre-history. Humanity did not
have to wait for Muhammad in order to gain the opportunity of
complete *success*." (Winter)
It is however 'to make of his religion as a *gaurdian* or *overseer*
(muhaymin) over the surviving advocates of the earlier versions of
faith.' (JB-an example they have to refer to arabic roots in order to
understand hebraic religious texts, as the former was preserved,
unlike its sister language- at the university of Tel Aviv in
Palestine.)
For example in the case of christianity:
'Islam thus ontologically demotes Jesus to the rank and files of
prophets, but it does not negate his messiahhood, and this may at
first seem paradoxical. The Koran describes Jesus as God's "word"
(kalima) (4:171)-not as uncreated logos but as the divine
utterence "Be! and it is"(3:59). All contingent phenomena are hence
*words* which reveal the divine immanence: "Wheresoever you turn,
there is the Face of God" (2:110), for he is "closer to man than his
juglar vein" (50:16). Because of the divine nearness to the creation,
expressed in the Koran's frequent invocation of the Divine *signs* in
nature and in its muted Fall narative, an *incarnation* is not
necessery, and would indeed imply that there had been a hopeless
estrangement of humankind from an utterly transcendent God, a concept
whose foriegnness to Islam will be revealed by any survey of its
devotional poetry. The question arises as to why the Koran and its
bearer, who announced finality and an eschatological role for his own
work, should have allowed messianic status, with all its culminating
implications, to Jesus.
The tradition clearly seeks to resolve the paradox in terms of the
*sealing* of prohetic cycles. Jesus was Messiah because he closed the
Jewish story. But Muhammad is the eschatological prophet (al-Aqib)(JB-
*The Last*) and the seal of Messengers (Khatam al-mursalin)and
because he closes a still more glorious and far wider story. Jesus is
counterpoint to Moses, while Muhammad becomes the culmination of the
larger tradition of which Abraham is the archetype. Hence Islam's
central rites often combine Abrahamic and eschatological
significance.' (Winters)
One only need to look at the pilgrimage to Mecca , which is a
commemoration of key Abrahamic events.'Abraham as the Koran puts it,
was "neither a Jew nor Christian"; he was a muslim, in the sense of
submitting to God in a primordial mode (3:67); and the retrieval of
primordiality, which forms the coda to imminently-ending religious
history, appears as the express purpose and temper of the Prophet's
life.' (Winters)'The Abrahamic archetype also underpins Islam's
understanding of its universiality, a further aspect of its
abrogationist theology.'(Winters)
'By linking the Semetic patrimony to that of Eygpt (JB-through
Ishmael, patriarch of the Arabs, who was half-Eygption), Islam
proclaims the validity of its extension and belongingness to the core
of the Gentile world.' 'A hadith records that " while earlier
prophets were sent only to there nations, I am sent to all
mankind"(Bukhari)'.
The classic Sunni reading of the revelation clearly confirms a
supersessionist event, which proclaims the abrogation (naskh) of
prior religion, and so, "in no way, then, does biblical Christianity
remain a fully vaild *way of salvation* after the advent of
the"(McAuliffe)' Holy Prophet(Allah bless all and give him peace).'
Honestly interpreted, the texts assume that while other communities
are to be tolerated, God's covenant is emphatically with the people
of Islam, as upholders of the final Abrahamic(JB-or the Adamic)
restoration.'
' This perception is implicit in the Muslim concept of covenant. The
Koran, as a recent study observes, is less covenantal than is the
Bible, probably because the Muslim scripture is " neither directed to
nor preoccupied with a single people, but to human beings as such, so
a historical covenant would not figure in its outworking" (Burrell
and Malits). Nonetheless a Koranic passage (7:172) does speak of a
primordial covenant between God and every human soul, sealed before
the creation of the world. In Muslim reflection, Islam is not a
compact with a particular section of humanity, but is the
eschatological restoration of this primordial pledge, one of whose
*signs* is the Hajj to the House which is "for all mankind" (2:125):
When God took the Covenant, He recorded it in writing and fed it to
the Black Stone, and this is the meaning of the saying of those who
touch the Stone during the rounds of the Ancient House: O God! This
is believing in You, fulfilling our pledge to You, and declaring the
truth of Your record.(Haddad)
By affirming the Prophet's eschatological retrieval of this first
covenantal relationship' (Winter), it discounts the 'validity of
later compacts between God and individual branches of the Adamic
family.(Winter)
[AC-The truth is that Christianity died centuries ago. First, it was
abrogated when Islam appeared, but the Roman state had been using a
deviant version of it to prop itself up with, and so it apparently
had a new lease of life which continued after Islam, but that version
was nothing to do with 'Isa, peace be upon him. We stand with all the
Europeans who were reaching out past decadent Christianity and
towards Islam centuries ago, such as Goethe, Nietzsche and Søren
Kierkegaard, a believing Christian, whose last act is devoted to
attacking the hypocrisy of the Church and of official Christianity
and calling for a return to something close to the actual teachings
of Isa. However, Kierkegaard was not heard. His Attack on Christendom
is fascinating reading.]
And so, to the fate of non-muslims in the traditional theological
(kalam) teachings:'The theodicy of particularism is resolved by the
view that damnation is entailed by wilful rejection, not by
ignorance. Given its lack of a doctrine of an original sin (in the
sense of an inherited defect of sanctifying grace), and its
consequent assurance that, in the words of a hadith, "every child is
born according to the primordial human disposition (fitra)"(Muslim),
a disposition which when maintained is enough to bring success
(Bukhari), Islam assumes all human beings as innocent until proven
otherwise, that sanctity is our natural condition even after the
Fall, and that heaven is hence the destination that is normative to
post-Adamic humanity.Since Adam's penitent 'turning' was accepted
(Koran 2:37).
Guided by this anthropolgy, most early kalam scholars regarded the
intellect as an autonomous source of moral knowledge, and affirmed
the capacity of human minds to reflect upon the general revelation in
nature so as to know God and the universals of moral law even in the
absence of a specific revelation. Just as intution, cautious
experimentation and observation allow us to differentiate between
nourishing and poisonous foods even without consulting an expert, so
too human beings may know virtue from vice without the help of
specific revelation (Nasafi). Indeed, the Maturidis (JB note-the two
main schools of theology in mainstream traditional Sunni Islam are
Ash'arism and Maturidism) held that the unreached are obligated
(mukallaf) in this respect and that God will judge them for their
response to Him even though he has not willed that they have a
detailed revealed law. The later Ash'ari position was more
pessimistic. Ghazali, for instance, will not allow so weighty a duty
to depend on the inherently unreliable and passional human mind. The
Maturidis maintain the earlier and apparently more Koranic faith in
the
indicativeness of the world.' So they are to be regarded as ' "in the
same category as the Muslims, but are excused of their ignorance of
[Islamic] prophecy and the ruling of the Shari'a" (Baghdadi), they
may be classed a functional religious community, for whom heaven or
hell are meaningful futures.'
' The late Ash'arite commitment to a *high* view of revelation
excluded the view that the unreached might be under an obligation to
know God and the moral law. Nonetheless, most Ash'arites held that
they were still able to do so. Individuals who infer the unity of God
but are ignorant of revealed law "have the status of Muslims" and can
achieve success in the next world. Those who die in a condition of
unbelief (kufr) because of a failure to make this deduction may
expect neither reward nor punishment, although God may admit them to
Paradise "through His sheer grace, not as a reward," just as he does
for children who die before maturity (Baghdadi).
Although the kalam thus holds that in the absence of revelation
theology is feasable (Ash'arism) or even required (Maturidism), God's
servants are thereby not excused the duty of recognising the prophet
of their time.
His form of religion has been divinely tailored to their needs and he
has been gifted with miracles commanding its acceptence; hence the
evidentiary signs of Muhammad's prophecy, including the pebbles which
sung God's praise in his hand, the splitting of the moon, and the
water which gushed from between his fingers (Baghdadi) (JB-or the
perpetual miracle the Qur'an). "[A]nd whoever claims that he used
magic or trickery in producing miracles is no better than he who
brings the same charge against Moses" (Baghdadi). However, the
prophet of the time need only be obeyed in the case of sound
conveyance, as the hadith cited earlier and the kalam consensus
insist. The Ash'aris and Maturidis make it clear that those who do
not know, through no fault of their own, are also candidates of falah.
For Sunni theologians of either persuasion the problem nonetheless
persists of how to define the point at which a new revealed religion
can be said to have been communicated. Were Byzantine theologians
guilty of a sinful rejection of God because they sincerely believed
that Muslims worshipped a hallow copper sphere (Sahas,1995), despite
the proximity of the Islamic lands and presence of Muslim travellers
and merchants, as late as the twelth century Muslim catechumens in
the Great Church had to pronounce a formula of renunciation of the
*hollow sphere* worshipped by Muhammad, or could the Latin crusading
elite be taken to task for refusing a religion that their Chansons de
Geste told them was a crude polytheism (Daniels, n.d.)?Islamic
theology never supplied a clear criterion, although a range of
opinions was ventured. One influential view was that of Ghazali, who
despite his Ash'arite pessimism on natural knowledge made clear his
belief that pre-Koranic communities could still experience falah,
even if they chose to reject Islam, when the new revelation has not
been adequately conveyed to them.'
' The most prominent Muslim theologian of eighteen-century India,
Shah Wali Allah al-Dahlawi, also taught that the inadequately reached
may attain success. In the course of his treatment of the Koranic
eschatological feature known as
al-Araf (the so called 'Heights', which are often seen as a limbo
from which souls will eventually pass into heavenly bliss) he writes,
in the paraphrase of his biographer:
Amoung the inmates of A'raf will be people who did not recieve the
message of God, and also those living on the mountaintops who neither
believed in Him nor associated with Him, and were just like animals
who care only for the satisfaction of their natural requirements. And
if they all recieved the message of Islam they did not derive any
benefit from it, due to their ignorance. They had been brought up
under circumstances which prevented them from paying any attention to
deep thinking. They were capable only of this much knowledge: that
Muslims are a people who eat such-and-such things and consider sus-
and -such things to be forbidden...As these people were like
quadrupeds and had not associated anything with God, they would not
be blamed or taken to task [for rejecting Islam].(Jalbani, 1967,158).
The teaching of Ghazali and Dahlawi, which is here clearly within
the kalam tradition developed by Baghdadi and others in response to
the Koranic revelation, unambiguously holds out the prospect of a
*wider hope*. While the blessing of membership of the community of
Muhammad confers maximal opportunities for sound belief and holiness
of life, theologians may readily accept that God's grace extends
beyond the frontiers of Islam insofar as present-day forms of pre-
Muslim belief adhered to by communities unaware of the teachings of
Islam authentically conserve monotheistic ideas and the principle of
the divine justice. In the case of such communities, the concept of
supersession appears to be a little more than theoretical. While
theologians should study such religious forms in an attempt to
identify genuine survivals of their founders' teachings, and may well
conclude that some have survived more authentically than others, they
are not in a position to assume that the existence of Islam permits
large judgements as to the ultimate fate of their individual
adherents. A prudent agnosticism will here seem indespensable to
those who hold that only God knows the criterion for assessing the
quality of a person's response to the religious options available to
his or her cultural setting.
As we have seen, the Koran places the final verdict in the hands of
God, who is expected to shed light on interreligious disputes at the
eschaton (5:48). The hadith material understands that this
illumination will be followed by the exercise of intercession by each
prophet for his flock, so that even where negative divine judgement
cannot be averted on grounds of invincible ignorance, it may be
mitigated or graciously laid asside following the eschatological
pleading of each community's avocate. Hence Moses shall intercede for
erring Jews, and Jesus will plead the case of Christians. Moreover
several hadith lead the tradition to believe that the Greatest
Intercession, which is to be exercised by the Prophet Muhammad alone,
as Prophet of Mercy and restorer of the Great Covnent, will extend
beyond the boundries of Muslim affiliation to allow a pleading for
adherents of previous versions of faith (Zabidi). This is not
understood as a postmortem evangelisation; it is simply a
manifestation of God's mercy through the channel of the
Prophet'(Allah bless them all and give them peace).
From the above brief, selected excerpts(and i hope informative)
exposition on Islamic theology, it should be clear that it 'cannot be
labelled as' being '*inclusivist*.
Given that Islam's assurance of multiple and equivalently saving
interventions in history, there is no need to engage in the
patronising exercise of regarding non-Muslims as *anonymous Muslims*,
if we take the term *Muslim* in the denominational sense. Although
the Prophet may ultimately bring about their salvation, their
submission to God, to the extent that they practise it, is derived
not onotologically, that is, *anonymously* from the person of
Muhammad, but epistemologically, from natural theology and from
remnant teachings handed down from the founders of their own
religions, whose detailed instructions are abrogated or have been
mislaid, but whose general teachings of the unity and justice of God
may be remembered sufficiently to trigger or to reinforce the
inference of God's existence and qualities from the natural order.
They are not Muslims, but they are, as the theologians put it,
adjudged to be in the same category. The kalam has hence never needed
to develop intricate theories of prevenient grace or postmortem
conversion. The doctrine of intercession, the Maturidite optimism
about the powers of natural reason, and the insistence on a cyclic
process of propositional revelation whose details are modulated in
each prophetic episode, instead of a single personal revelation which
tends to divide history and also geography into categorically
different parts, render the question of the falah of the Other a
comparitively simple one.
Even though it conserves the Muslim scriptural assurance of the naskh
of the earlier messages, this model of non-categoric supersesion may
serve to obviate one of the hazards of supersessionist theologies
which pluralists most frequently cite, namely the sin of arrogance.
The Ghazalian perspective shifts much of the burden of accountability
from the shoulders of the unreached, here generously defined, to set
it upon the shoulders of Muslim believers, creating the humbling
possibility that a *bien-peasant* Muslim may be passed over for falah
in favour of his non-Muslim neighbour. Supersessionism thus has
negative implications for dialouge only when read as a cause for
triumpalism, rather than as a spur to the contrite awareness of a
heavy responsibility. Triumpalism, moreover, seems scarcely feasible
as a contempory attitude given the collapse of Islam's erstwhile
position of global domination. Even the Dome of the Rock has become
an ambiguous sign.'
It is a mistake on the part of those who suggest that
the 'foundational claims for the present centrality of one's own
community in salvation history ineluctably lead believers towards
hubris, discord and confrontation. While this appears to be the case
with the very absolute claims for uniqueness made by many forms of
Western Christianity, it is less unambiguously valid in the case of
other faith communities such as Islam, where a scriptural doctrine of
non-categoric supersession has in practise often underpinned a level
of religious coexistence which has been sustained for centuries, and
can today easily support a theology of an authentic esteem for the
Other.'
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