Category Archives: Islam

A heretical Catholic priest named Arius: the father of Islam

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June 29, 2017                                                                                                                               The Solemnity of the Apostles Saints Peter and Paul

During the early eighth century Saint John of Damascus gave us the first extensive description of what the world would come to know as Islam, though he himself uses that word.  This passage comes his work Heresies in Epitome: How They Began and Whence They Drew Their Origin and I have taken it from the following website: http://orthodoxinfo.com/general/stjohn_islam.aspx .  The description he gives of religion of the Arabs at this time and of their prophet is fascinating, especially as it relates to the question of Arianism and its relationship to what we know as Islam:

There is also the superstition of the Ishmaelites which to this day prevails and keeps people in error, being a forerunner of the Antichrist. They are descended from Ishmael, [who] was born to Abraham of Agar, and for this reason they are called both Agarenes and Ishmaelites. They are also called Saracens, which is derived from Sarras kenoi, or destitute of Sara, because of what Agar said to the angel: ‘Sara hath sent me away destitute.’  These used to be idolaters and worshiped the morning star and Aphrodite, whom in their own language they called Khabár, which means great. [100] And so down to the time of Heraclius they were very great idolaters. From that time to the present a false prophet named Mohammed has appeared in their midst. This man, after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy. Then, having insinuated himself into the good graces of the people by a show of seeming piety, he gave out that a certain book had been sent down to him from heaven. He had set down some ridiculous compositions in this book of his and he gave it to them as an object of veneration.

He says that there is one God, creator of all things, who has neither been begotten nor has begotten.  He says that the Christ is the Word of God and His Spirit, but a creature and a servant, and that He was begotten, without seed, of Mary the sister of Moses and Aaron.  For, he says, the Word and God and the Spirit entered into Mary and she brought forth Jesus, who was a prophet and servant of God. And he says that the Jews wanted to crucify Him in violation of the law, and that they seized His shadow and crucified this. But the Christ Himself was not crucified, he says, nor did He die, for God out of His love for Him took Him to Himself into heaven.  And he says this, that when the Christ had ascended into heaven God asked Him: ‘O Jesus, didst thou say: “I am the Son of God and God”?’ And Jesus, he says, answered: ‘Be merciful to me, Lord. Thou knowest that I did not say this and that I did not scorn to be thy servant. But sinful men have written that I made this statement, and they have lied about me and have fallen into error.’ …

Moreover, they call us Hetaeriasts, or Associators, because, they say, we introduce an associate with God by declaring Christ to the Son of God and God.

You will notice right there in the middle of the first paragraph that it seemed to Saint John of Damascus that this man who the Arabs thought was a prophet had met and conversed with an Arian monk.  But why would he say this, and what was this Arianism thing that he was talking about?

By the time of Saint John of Damascus Arianism was dead or almost dead within the Christian world, but during its heyday four centuries before it had ranked among the greatest challenges the Church had ever faced.  This thing spread like a cancer throughout the Christian world and threatened to bring the newly emancipated Church to her knees for a time until God raised up Saint Anthanasius and the long and hard road to wiping this disease out had begun.  But what was it?

1) The doctrines of Arius

To understand what Arianism was we have to go back almost to the beginning, to the end of the Apostolic Age.  Saint John, who was then the last living Apostle and whose time on earth was running out, gives the Church both of his day and for all time this stark warning in his second Epistle:

For many seducers are gone out into the world, who confess not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh: this is a seducer and an antichrist (2 John 7). 

But what is he talking about here, about them being seducers who do not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh?  Certainly most heretics then and now have publicly confessed in some way, shape, or form the name of Jesus Christ and only a few have denied that whatever false version of Jesus Christ they confess actually came in the flesh.  So what is the Apostle talking about here?

To understand this statement we have to go back to the beginning of that same Apostle’s first epistle:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the word of life: for the life was manifested; and we have seen and do bear witness, and declare unto you the life eternal, which was with the Father has appeared to us (1 John 1-2)

Here we get to the nub of the matter: the Apostle solemnly declares here that Eternal Life Itself took on flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ.  This is a concept that is beyond human (and perhaps even angelic) comprehension.  On our own don’t have the first clue what this really means.  We merely have to accept it and to believe it, but many would fall into error in the centuries after the Apostle wrote these words trying to provide their own definitions and explanations for what they meant.

The priest Arius was one of them.  He was not the first but he proved to be a funnel that channeled the primitive errors of the first Christian centuries into an organized movement that swept the Roman world.  He could not accept this teaching, or rather he strove to provide his own explanation for this great Mystery and he failed; in the process he produced a phenomenal error that continues to plague the Church and the world to this day.

When he deposed and excommunicated Arius and his cohorts in the year 318 AD the Bishop Alexander of Alexandria sent out a letter to the whole Catholic world explaining his reasons for taking this drastic step because Arius and his men were using deceitful tactics to gain the sympathy of many Catholic prelates.  In it he provides to his readers an excellent summary of the beliefs of this new sect that would go on to wreak such havoc:

And the words invented by them, and spoken contrary to the mind of Scripture, are as follows:-

“God was not always the Father; but there was a time when God was not the Father.  The Word of God was not always, but was made ‘from things that are not;’  for He who is God fashioned the non-existing from the non-existing; wherefore there was a time when He was not.  For the Son is a thing created, and a thing made: nor is He like to the Father in substance; nor is He the true and natural Word of the Father; nor is He His true Wisdom; but He is one of the things fashioned and made.  And He is called, by a misapplication of the terms, the Word and Wisdom, since He is Himself made by the proper Word of God, and by that wisdom which is in God, in which, as God made all other things, so also did He make Him.  Wherefore, He is by his very nature changeable and mutable, equally with other rational beings.  The Word, too, is alien and separate from the substance of God.  The Father also is ineffable to the Son; for neither does the Word perfectly and accurately know the Father, neither can He perfectly see Him.  For neither does the Son indeed know his own substance as it is.  Since He for our sakes was made. that by Him as by an instrument God might create us; nor would He have existed had not God wished to make us.

Some one asked of them whether the Son of God could change even as the devil changed and they feared not to answer that He can for since He was made and created, He is of mutable nature.”

These doctrines directly contradict the words of Jesus Christ and of Sacred Scripture in general on more occasions than you can count.  They count the Word by which the world was created as itself a created thing, thus distancing the world from God.  They say that the Son is separate from the Father, thus denying the Trinity.  And if one says that the Son is not God then one de facto denies the Incarnation.  Arius definitely did not lack ambition.  But the upshot of his professed doctrines is to try to accept Jesus Christ as some sort of exalted figure while at the same time denying both the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Where else do we find this?

In the Qur’an.  It is true that the portrayal of Jesus Christ was much more exalted in the mouth of Arius and his compatriots in the early 4th century than what is found in the Qur’an more than three hundred years later, but when you separate yourself from the Truth even in the slightest degree then the distance between you and that Truth will continue to grow over time.

How did Arius respond to these charges?  He wrote in response a letter to the same Bishop Alexander in the same year 318 AD.  In it he expresses some thoughts that are highly relevant to our discussion and I have spliced them together here for your consideration (the Scriptural citations were added by modern authors):

We acknowledge One God, alone unbegotten, alone everlasting, alone without beginning, alone true, alone having immortality, alone wise, alone good, alone sovereign…

And God, being the cause of all that happens, is absolutely alone without beginning; but the Son, begotten apart from time by the Father, and created and founded before the ages, was not in existence before his generation, but was begotten apart from time before all things, and he alone came into existence from the Father. For he is neither eternal nor co-eternal nor co-unbegotten with the Father, nor does he have his being together with the Father, as some speak of relations, introducing two unbegotten beginnings. But God is before all things as monad and beginning of all. Therefore he is also before the Son…

Therefore he thus has his being from God; and glories, and life, and all things have been given over to him; in this way God is his beginning. For he is over him, as his God and being before him. But if the expressions from him [Rom. 11:36] and from the womb [Ps. 109:3 (LXX), 110:3 English] and I came from the Father, and I have come [John 16:28], are understood by some to mean that he is part of him [the Father], one in essence or as an emanation, then the Father is, according to them, compounded and divisible and alterable and material, and, as far as their belief goes, the incorporeal God endures a body.

This is an abject contradiction of almost everything that Jesus Christ said about Himself in the Gospels but Arius also contradicts himself here.  He both asserts that the the Son was not always in existence and that He was created outside of time.  That doesn’t wash.  Time exists because of change.  And the change from non being to being of the Son implies de facto that it was done in time!  All of this is of the utmost importance because far from being a long dead heresy it forms the root and core of the the Islamic conception of the nature of God.

The Libyan priest’s fanatical defense here of the unity and transcendence of God leads him to deny the Trinity and the shared and equal Eternal Life of the Three Sacred Persons that manifests itself in nature and in all human society.  One can say that all society of any kind, whether animal or vegetable or human, is nothing but a very dim and distant reflection of the life of the Trinity but Arius’ prime assertion here is that God is a monad i.e. single and alone, or to put it another way: Allah is one God! (Qur’an 4: 171)

The Catholic Church does assert that the Son is begotten by the Father, but what this means or how it works exactly she has never made any claim to be able to explain since it is beyond natural human capacity to understand these things.  We must simply believe them.

Arius on the other hand in his fanatical defense of the unity of God denies his very Life.  Notice how many times he uses the word ‘alone’ in that first paragraph.  His insistence on God being a solitary Being is a denial of Life itself.  Life is individuals living in community.  Life in the natural world is a result of the communion of two beings to bring a third into being.  Life does not spring from a solitary creature save in the lowest forms of bacteria.  Life is all about communion.  There is no alone in life.

2) The history of Arianism and its historical progression

Arius published his doctrine in Alexandria before 318 AD.  He fled and gained the support Bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia which was on the Asian side of the Bosporus, just opposite the then newly founded capital of Constantinople.  His ideas began to spread like wildfire through the empire.  The conflict forced the Emperor Constantine to bring the Bishops together at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 where Arius and his ideas were condemned and Bishop Alexander’s excommunication confirmed.

This condemnation had little effect.  Arianism found a foothold among the upper classes and the imperial family of the Roman Empire because it gave them a way to differentiate themselves from the common people who never were seduced by these heretical doctrines.  There were a couple of Arian emperors after Constantine and it suddenly became difficult to be an orthodox Catholic, and especially an orthodox bishop.

As a result a new class of people came into being called ‘semi-Arians.’  These ones didn’t really have a strong theological opinion one way or the other.  They simply wanted peace, peace with the empire and peace with each other and they were willing to compromise the Truth to get that false peace.

It should be understood that even while Arianism was sweeping the empire there seem to have been very few of what might be called fanatical Arians: that is men who were fanatical for the ideas themselves.  Mainly what the vast majority of the Arians of the 4th century were fanatical about was their position in society and gaining imperial patronage, and they would profess whatever theological opinion that was required to attain to these things.  That is why Saint Athanasius was described as being ‘alone against the world’ during his struggles.  Not because the Arian bishops were theological fanatics, though doubtless some were in that camp, but because they didn’t want Athanasius rocking the boat and messing things up; and oftentimes these folk can be far more dangerous to your life and property than theological fanatics.

But the work of Saint Athanasius did stabilize the situation doctrinally, and the Council of Constantinople was called in 381 AD and once more Arianism was condemned.  But the Church was aided this time by a firmly Catholic emperor Theodosius and Arianism rapidly began to lose favor within the empire.   But because of its connection with the Roman military caste of the time that had grown up during the decades of imperial patronage and the work of some Arian missionaries it gained new life among the barbarian tribes who were beginning to conquer great swathes of formerly Roman territory as the Western Roman Empire fell apart during the fifth century.

So now as the fifth century turned into the sixth the Catholic populations of Italy, Spain, and North Africa (modern day Tunisia and parts of Algeria) all fell under the rule of barbarian tribesmen who were Arian.  These men were not theological fanatics but they oftentimes did persecute the Catholic Church and her clergy and the Church was not generally at peace in those territories.

God however had other plans.  He raised up Clovis, the king of the Franks, in the early 500s and brought him into the Catholic Church.  The Franks began to form a powerful kingdom that was the forerunner of France thus earning for that country the title eldest daughter of the Church which she wore proudly for almost thirteen centuries until the disaster of 1789 from which she has never recovered.  But the Franks were the first of the barbarian tribes to become Catholics en masse and this helped to pave the way for others to come into the Church and when the forces of the Eastern Emperor Justinian reconquered Italy and North Africa and parts of Spain during the middle part of the sixth century these regions lost their Arian rulers and the political power of the Arians began to die out.

3)Arianism and Islam

So now as the 500s turned into the 600s Arianism had long lost its theological force in the Mediterranean world, and now its political support dwindled to nothing.  Open and avowed Arians, especially clergy and/or monks, would no longer have been welcome anywhere in the lands that had once been or still were part of the Empire.  They either would have left the Empire on their own to seek greener pastures or they would have been exiled.  Either way there must have been a deep and stirring dislike or even hatred for both the Empire and the Church that they felt had deprived them of their homeland.

But yet if they left it meant that they did adhere to their beliefs.  There must have been some who really did believe the doctrines of Arius or else the thing would have dissipated long before.

We do not know how the Arians lived their lives in those centuries or how they professed their beliefs.  The writings of Arians were rightfully destroyed by the ecclesiastical and civil authorities because of the lies contained in them so we do not possess any Arian prayer books or the like.  There is an account of a Spanish martyr named Hermengildus, the son of a Gothic king, who suffered his martyrdom during the 580s for refusing to receive communion from the hands of an Arian prelate so we know that there must have been at least when they dwelt in the Christianized provinces of the Empire some sort of a similitude of the Mass.  But we do not know how they understood something like Holy Communion as they denied the Eternity of Christ.  Or maybe this particular case was of a part of the clergy who wanted to profess Arianism for political purposes while maintaining the outward appearances of Catholicism for whatever reason.  Maybe there were many like this, we don’t know.

Nor do we have any idea of how the Arians who were fanatical enough about their beliefs to be exiled to a place like Arabia when things went south for them in the Empire would have lived or expressed those beliefs.  Maybe they would have long since dispensed with the idea of the Mass, after all if you deny the Eternal Nature of the Son of God and his Incarnation then there can be no Eternal Sacrifice can there?  In that case what are you really offering at Mass?  Just some flour mixed with water and baked and a cup of wine.  It really is a wonder why so many priests fell for the stupid theology of Arianism since its very essence tends to talk them out of their jobs.

So put yourself in the place of one of Arius’ ardent followers exiled to the desert and really believing what his spiritual father had cried out almost three centuries before: “We acknowledge One God, alone unbegotten, alone everlasting, alone without beginning, alone true, alone having immortality, alone wise, alone good, alone sovereign…  And God, being the cause of all that happens, is absolutely alone without beginning; but the Son, begotten apart from time by the Father, and created and founded before the ages, was not in existence before his generation”.

Think about this statement and all of its implications and put yourself in the position of that follower of Arius three centuries later who had been dispossessed and driven from his homeland and willing to sacrifice everything he had for his misguided belief.  Could you not imagine such a one as this exiled to the deserts of Arabia, once he had learned the local language, crying out to anyone who would listen something like Lâ ilâha illa illallah: “There is no god but God!”?  And if he did get some disciple, say a local merchant with a well to do wife who had connections throughout the Arabian peninsula, to follow him could you not imagine this follower of Arius teaching that disciple about those accursed Trinitarians, those glorified polytheists up north who only wanted to divide God and to cut him up and create many gods from the one God and who commit the most atrocious blasphemy by associating a creature i.e. Jesus Christ with the Eternal Godhead.  Perhaps this Arian monk told his disciple that if he ever encountered anyone like that then he should speak to them like this:

O People of the Book, exceed not the limits in your religion or speak anything about Allah, but the truth. The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only a messenger of Allah and His word which He communicated to Mary and a spirit from Him. So believe in Allah and His messengers. And say not, Three. Desist, it is better for you. Allah is only one God. Far be it from His glory to have a son. (Qur’an 4: 171)

This is nothing but an Arian confession of faith.  A gospel according to Arius.

For all we know these may have even been the thoughts of Arius himself, which he expressed to his disciples in one of his more honest moments when he wasn’t trying either to placate or seduce some ecclesiastical authority with his protestations that he thought that the Word was indeed the Son of God, well kind of, or that He was almost eternal, but not quite.  And these words of Arius — I mean Muhammad — I mean Allah– not only found their way into the Qur’an but were also inscribed all along the inside rim of the first great building built by the Arab conquerors in Jerusalem, the Dome of the Rock, along with many other interesting things that I hope to get to in the next post.

I think now we have a much better idea why Saint John of Damascus naturally assumed that Muhammad had come into contact with an Arian monk at some point.  I would like to close here with a Benediction that was pronounced over those who had rejected their past belief in the Arian heresy and come into the Catholic Church.  It comes from a copy of a Roman Sacramentary produced at Paris around the year 750 AD but the contents date from a much earlier time closer to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.  I will give it first in the original Latin and then supply my own English translation:

BENEDICTIO SUPER EOS QUI DE ARIANA AD CATHOLICAM REDEUNT UNITATEM

Domine Deus omnipotens, Pater Domini nostri Iesu Christi, qui dignatus es famulos et famulas tuas ab errore et mendacio haeresos Arianae eruere, et ad ecclesiam tuam sanctam catholicam eos perducere, tu, Domine, mitte in eos Spiritum Paraclitum sanctum sapientiae et intellectus, spiritum consilii et fortitudinis, spiritum scientiae et pietatis, et adimple eos, Domine, spiritum timoris Dei, in nomine Iesu Christi salvatoris nostri.  Per quem et cum quo tibi honor et gloria in saecula saeculorum.  Amen.

BLESSING OVER THOSE WHO TURN BACK FROM ARIANISM TO CATHOLIC UNITY

Lord God Almighty, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who have deigned to rescue your servants from the error and lie of Arianism, and to have led them through to your holy Catholic Church; You Lord send to them the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the Spirit of counsel and of strength, the Spirit of knowledge and of piety, and fill them Lord with the Spirit of the fear of God; in the Name of Jesus Christ our Savior.  Through Whom and with Whom be honor and glory to You forever and all ages.  Amen.

May a blessing like this be pronounced of a great multitude of Muslims on the day that they are rescued from the lie that started with an heretical Catholic priest named Arius.

Immaculate Heart of Mary pray for us.  Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on us.

The birth of Islam

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June 28, 2017                                                                                                                               The Memorial of Saint Irenaeus

Over the past six months or so I have been reading the work of several scholars and writers who are reexamining the events of the middle part of the first millennium in the Middle East that gave birth to the thing we know as Islam.  I confess that I had simply taken the Muslim story for granted i.e. that things pretty much did happen the way they said, except that I didn’t believe that the revelation was divine.  It seemed to me that the Muslim accounts of the events of the seventh century could be relied upon to give a basic framework of what took place if you took certain of their embellishments with a very large grain of salt.

But maybe that isn’t the case.  In my ignorance I was completely unaware that the first biography of Muhammad was not even written until a century after his reported death in 632 A.D.  and the establishment of the Arab empire in the Middle East, and that we only possess even this biography in very large fragments from a book that was penned a lifetime after that, in the early 800s.

And the copious and many time self contradictory hadith that give Muslims the details of their prophet’s life and form the basis for their understanding of how they should live their own lives and that I have quoted from in other posts on this site were only compiled during the middle part of the 800s, some two hundred years after the man’s reported death.

So what is going on here?  A pious believing Muslim would tell us that, sure, all of these written records were indeed compiled when you say they were compiled but all of the information contained in them were passed down orally (and the Arab culture of the time was essentially an oral culture) and faithfully through the many lifetimes that intervened between the time of Muhammad and the time that the events of his life were committed to writing.  Really?

And before you say “It is the same thing with the Gospels!  They were based on a vague oral tradition and only written centuries after the life of Jesus, whoever he was, if he even existed, so if you don’t believe what the Muslims tell us about Muhammad on that basis then why should I ever believe anything you say about Jesus?” I will tell you that the textual evidence from inside the Gospels, not to mention the parts of the Acts of the Apostles written in the first person by someone who obviously took part in some of the events he was recording and who also wrote the Gospel of Saint Luke about the life of Jesus, indicates that they are the product of eyewitness testimony and were all, save Saint John, composed in the decades immediately following the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus Christ.  So spare me, and spare yourself, all of the fairy tales about Q and J and D and E and P and X and Y and Z, and leave the fantasies of modern ‘scholars’ who have spent their lives searching for highbrow sounding excuses to justify their unbelief on the side of the road where they belong.  Just read the Gospels themselves.

But back to the Muslims.  To believe that these memories were transmitted faithfully over so many generations then you really do have to believe that Muhammad was a divine messenger and that the Qur’an is divine revelation.  Because Divine protection is the only way of securing accurately and in great detail a message from the Most High (or anything else for that matter) that is transmitted among men across so many generations.  But was Muhammad a divine messenger?  What is the evidence?

You can already guess what my answer to that question will be, but there are a billion people in the world who think otherwise.  So let’s look at the evidence.  I was intrigued by the title of Robert Spencer’s book Did Muhammad Exist? so I read it and that in turn lead me to a collection of essays on the same subject entitled Early Islam and edited by Karl-Heinz Ohlig.

I will say first off that I do not agree with many of the conclusions of these authors.  Robert Spencer’s concern is politics.  He seems to see everything through the lens of the contemporary conflict of the last few decades between radical Islamic ideology and the secularist and functionally atheistic republics who have since the end of the 18th century dominated life in the formerly Catholic world.  Ohlig and the authors that he publishes are largely German and still in love with the so called ‘enlightenment,’ despite all of the terrors and misery that it has brought to our world.  The evince a loathing for every bit of evidence anywhere and on any subject that even indirectly points to the remotest possibility that there is an objective Truth outside of their own opinions and that this Truth has somehow revealed Himself in our world.  In other words they are completely hostile to even the idea of any sort of revealed religion anywhere in our world.

This hatred for Divine Revelation clouds their viewpoint and all of the conclusions they reach.  The people who lived during the time they are discussing, whether Christian or not, did not share this hatred, in fact the vast majority of them felt exactly the opposite and thus a chasm of misunderstanding opens up between our scholars and the people they are discussing.  Thus they are led to some of the most preposterous conclusions imaginable.

For example, the basic thesis of Ohlig and his companions seems to be that there was no real Arab conquest of the Middle East during the seventh century.  They posit that the Byzantines, after fighting an almost thirty year war against the Persians to first protect and then to get back the provinces of Egypt, Syria, and Palestine and the holy city of Jerusalem, then just decided to give them up, these the richest and most valued provinces of their empire, and hand them over to some Arab governors who became Arab kings and who were supposedly the real founders of the Arab empire.  Does that even make any sense?

Second they posit that, based on that assumption, there was no charismatic figure who united the peoples of the Arabian peninsula, there was no sudden conquest out of nowhere that shook the world.  No, it was all very gradual and in fact nobody even really noticed the change at first.  Really?  The historical memory in the bones of every Christian would belie that point.  But those men are not Christians.

So why do I bring all of this up?  Why even listen to these men?

Because something happened in the seventh century.  But what?  The canonical Muslim sources date from many lifetimes later, but there are other sources that come from that time, and these authors do an excellent job of cataloging them, even if they misuse and draw wrong conclusions from them.

Something happened in the seventh century somewhere in Arabia that has perpetrated and has been made to perpetrate a fraud that has now captured the hearts of a billion people.  They deserve to hear the truth because they all share in the Human Nature of Jesus Christ and they are all sons of his holy Mother just like us, and they have the same right to know the Gospel as we and as our ancestors have had.

The evidence that this new seventh century ‘revelation’ to the Arabs, whatever they thought of it at the time, was not new and was not a revelation is all over their holy book and the history of those times.  But to understand it one must understand the Catholic Church and one must understand her enemies both in the other world and in this world.  And one must understand her history to understand the history of those enemies.

I have no letters after my name, and I work in a humble profession , but I have gleaned the knowledge of some things about history and about religion and about languages and about the history of the Church during my life.  Therefore I intend, God willing, to make the case here that to really understand the history of Islam we have to begin by going back three centuries to the days of Constantine, when the authority of a single Roman Caesar still held sway over the whole territory from Palestine to the borders of Scotland, and we must begin our discussion with a certain Libyan priest who took up his career in Alexandria named Arius, because the doctrines that he and his successors spread throughout the Roman Empire and the Mediterranean world are where Islam really began.  In the next post I intend to examine what we know of the history of Arianism and its doctrines and to examine the possibilities of a relationship between those doctrines and the doctrines that form the foundation of what is called Islam.

I entrust this effort to the protection of Our Lady of Fatima, fifteen days after the hundredth anniversary of the revelation of of her Immaculate Heart, and I beg her intercession with her Divine Son that whatever is done here may serve his inscrutable purposes and his Holy Will.

Meanwhile the Islamic State advances…

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While presidents and prime ministers dither in Washington, London, Baghdad, Paris name your capital the Islamic State staged another advance and captured twenty one Kurdish villages in northern Syria along the Turkish border during the last forty eight hours.  The low casualty count among the Kurdish forces protecting the area, seven reported killed, is a likely indicator that whoever was supposed to be defending these villages simply ran away.

The rather confused Western response since June to the menace of the Islamic State is strange since the group/state (whatever they are) could easily have been defeated then and probably still could be now by a fraction of the power that the United States military is capable of bringing to bear.  But instead worry and doubt and confusion cloud the eyes of American and European leaders and their publics.  If one looks at history, especially Biblical history, one finds that at moments of great historical change a certain blindness overtakes those who are accounted powerful.  All of the sudden they just are not capable of doing what on paper they should be able to do with great ease.  It just isn’t in them anymore.  Strange, isn’t it?  Are we at one of those historical moments?  Time will tell.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.  And join the Rosary Confraternity!

The Islamic State

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The Feast of Saint Louis

Over the past two weeks the United States has begun a military air campaign in northern Iraq to prevent the forces of the Islamic State from advancing into Kurdistan and devastating Kurdish peshmerga forces and to help them regain control of the Mosul Dam.  The Islamic State then withdrew its forces from those locations and its advances in Iraq appear to have, for the moment, been blunted.  So whither the Islamic State?  Whiter Iraq and whither Syria?  What is going on here? Has the insertion of limited US air power in northern Iraq and the entrance of a few hundred military advisers into the country fundamentally changed the situation or not?

The American air strikes have so far been limited and the capabilities of the Islamic State are much more advanced than any terrorist group has had in modern times.  The have begun to actually form themselves into a state in the territories they have taken over and most importantly they have a serious budget.  Seizing large amounts of cash in Mosul, gaining oil revenue from the fields they have captured in Syria, and presumably garnering some sort of tax revenue from their conquered territories makes them essentially a terrorist army, a force that may end up being a serious threat to the current world order.

And while the Islamic State has temporarily paused its offensive in Iraq it has done no such thing in Syria.  Yesterday its forces seized the Tabqa airbase southwest of the Islamic State’s de facto capital of Raqah in north central Syria, thereby clearing that province of all Syrian government forces.

But here is the issue.  The Islamic State needs to be defeated in both Syria and Iraq and the border between those two countries needs to be reestablished as it was before June.  Unless the United States is prepared to send several hundred thousand ground troops into both Syria and Iraq (which it will not do) then it will need to coordinate with both Bashar al-Assad in Syria, which Barack Obama will be loathe to do, and some sort of working government which does not yet exist in Baghdad and have them work in concert to set things back to the way they were.  Does anyone see that happening?

The rise of the Islamic State and its declaration of caliphate is nothing less than an attempt at world revolution akin to what the Nazis and the Bolsheviks did in the last century.  If it is not strangled in the cradle then this world will be far different by the time the next decade ends.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and for their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the Muslim peoples.  And join the Rosary Confraternity!

What is Islam Part 4: The Mother of God in Islam

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The Feast of Saints Joachim and Anne

The Second Vatican Council in its declaration on the relationship of the Catholic Church with non-Christian religions Nostra Aetate declared that “The Church regards with esteem also the Moslems… (who) also honor Mary, His (Jesus’) Virgin Mother, and at times they also call on her with devotion.”  That is true, as far as it goes, but incomplete.  There are very important differences in the understanding of the Virgin Mary’s role in human history which reflect on the entirely different worldview that the Catholic has regarding his Creator, his relationship with that Creator, and his destiny.

The Qur’an relates the story of the Annunciation twice, both in sura 3 (The Family of Imran) and in sura 19 (Maryam).  Both of these episodes reveal a strong familiarity with Saint Luke’s account (they both begin with the message of the angel to Zechariah concerning John the Baptist and an altered version of his subsequent dumbness) of the same event, but both are also a manipulation and a strategic mutilation of this event and its significance for the human race.

The accounts in sura 3 and sura 19 are slightly different but for our purposes in this brief post they serve the same function.

Here is the account given in the Qur’an in sura 19, Maryam (16-22):

وَاذْكُرْ فِي الْكِتَابِ مَرْيَمَ إِذِ انتَبَذَتْ مِنْ أَهْلِهَا مَكَانًا شَرْقِيًّا ﴿١٦﴾فَاتَّخَذَتْ مِن دُونِهِمْ حِجَابًا فَأَرْسَلْنَا إِلَيْهَا رُوحَنَا فَتَمَثَّلَ لَهَا بَشَرًا سَوِيًّا ﴿١٧﴾ قَالَتْ إِنِّي أَعُوذُ بِالرَّحْمَـٰنِ مِنكَ إِن كُنتَ تَقِيًّا ﴿١٨﴾قَالَ إِنَّمَا أَنَا رَسُولُ رَبِّكِ لِأَهَبَ لَكِ غُلَامًا زَكِيًّا ﴿١٩﴾ قَالَتْ أَنَّىٰ يَكُونُ لِي غُلَامٌ وَلَمْ يَمْسَسْنِي بَشَرٌ وَلَمْ أَكُ بَغِيًّا ﴿٢٠﴾ قَالَ كَذَٰلِكِ قَالَ رَبُّكِ هُوَ عَلَيَّ هَيِّنٌ ۖ وَلِنَجْعَلَهُ آيَةً لِّلنَّاسِ وَرَحْمَةً مِّنَّا ۚ وَكَانَ أَمْرًا مَّقْضِيًّا ﴿٢١﴾ فَحَمَلَتْهُ فَانتَبَذَتْ بِهِ مَكَانًا قَصِيًّ

English translation by Maulana Muhammad Ali

And mention Mary in the Book.  When she drew aside from her family to an eastern place.  So she screened herself from them.  Then We sent Our spirit and it appeared to her as a well-made man.

 She said: I flee for refuge from thee to the Beneficent, if thou art one guarding against evil.

 He said I am only bearer of a message of the Lord: That I will give thee a pure boy.

 She said: How can I have a son and no mortal has yet touched me nor have I been unchaste?

 He said: So (it will be).  Thy Lord says: It is easy to Me; and that We may make him a sign to men and a mercy from Us.  And it is a matter decreed.

 Then she conceived him; and withdrew with him to a remote place.

Notice anything missing there?  Let’s take a look at Saint Luke’s (1: 26-38) account of the same event written more than half a millennium before in the Douay-Rheims Challoner translation:

 And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, to a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin’s name was Mary.  And the angle being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women.

 Who having heard, was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be.

 And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God.  Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus.  He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the most High; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob forever.  And of his kingdom there shall be no end.

 And Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man?

 And the angel answering, said to her: the Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee.  And therefore also the Holy which shall  be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.  And behold they cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with here that is called barren:  because no word shall be impossible with God.

 And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word.

Just looking at these two passages alone, one from the Qur’an and the other from the Gospel of Luke, one can see immediately the depth and richness of the Catholic Faith compared to the paltriness of Islam.  In Saint Luke’s account of the Annunciation the depth of the human being’s relationship with God that comes to its fullness in the person of Jesus Christ is in full view while in the Qur’an things happen in a strange and nonsensical way: the spirit of Allah appearing to Mary in some eastern place as a well made man?  What is that?  But we are getting beyond my point here.

What is missing from the account in the Qur’an?  Many things, but one thing in particular: the Blessed Mother’s fiat, the most significant event in human history.  Because here it was that a choice was made.  By the Virgin Mother of God’s yes to God she reversed the choice of Adam and of Eve and made it possible for each one of us to make the same choice each day of our lives.  Her yes brought a new world into being and made all of us sons of God by adoption through her son our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Angelus prayer reminds us that the Blessed Mother’s fiat brought about the Incarnation of God in human flesh and the Redemption of mankind.  And it is a reminder to all of us that our way of participating in our own salvation and that of mankind is to issue our own fiat to the will of God each day of our lives.

This is what the Qur’an denies.  In the Qur’an the answer of the angel to the virgin’s question is simply something along the lines of “Allah can do whatever he wants.”  She neither accepts nor rejects this scenario but conceives and withdraws to a desert place.

And this is Islam’s view of the universe.  Allah is an arbitrary god, giving and taking away often for no particular reason.  Human beings must follow the law as revealed to them in the Qur’an but there is zero sense of any cooperation with the divine will.  Just as they reject the divine Nature of Jesus Christ, in fact because they do this, there is no possibility of a human being sharing in the life of the Holy Trinity because for them there is no Trinity.  For Catholics God is relationship.  For Muslims Allah is necessarily solitary and alone, all powerful, aloof and distant.  In truth Allah must be a dead god, because he has not the life of relationship in him.  Muslims hope to achieve some worldly paradise after death at the whim of Allah but can never hope to share in his life because, in the end, he has none.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.  And join the Rosary Confraternity!

 

 

The man who would be Caliph

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The Feast of St. Anthony Zaccaria

Today the Islamic State released footage of a man they claim to be Caliph Ibrahim, better known to the world by his nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

 

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi addressing worshipers at a mosque in Mosul (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arabic/middleeast/2014/07/140705_iraq_security_retirement.shtml)

Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi addressing worshipers at a mosque in Mosul (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arabic/middleeast/2014/07/140705_iraq_security_retirement.shtml)

Baghdadi apparently addressed worshippers at a mosque in central Mosul and declared that he was their (والي) or custodian/leader/guardian, there isn’t really a great English translation.  He also declared that while he was ‘not the best of you’ he expected to be obeyed by all Muslims if he followed Allah and advised of it if he erred though how well men like this take advice on their errors remains an open question.  His declaration of a caliphate and himself as caliph has met largely with scorn and derision from across the Muslim world, but time will tell.  If the Islamic State can continue to string together victories in Iraq and Syria then who knows?  Muslims from around the world who are starved for leadership (a condition we Catholics can relate to, though we are looking for a far different kind of leader; stop being so enamored with this passing world priests and bishops and Holy Father and just preach the Gospel!) may flock to him.  We shall see.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

Caliphate: June 29, 2014

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On this feast of Saints Peter and Paul the Shura council of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام ) has now, officially at least, transformed the Islamic state into a caliphate, with its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as caliph (الخليفة) of all Muslims and its borders stretching from Aleppo to Diyala province of Iraq.  Caliph is the ancient Islamic term for a position that by the Catholic mind may well considered a combination of Pope and Emperor.  The first four caliphs conquered much of what is now the Islamic world in a series of lightning campaigns that greatly weakened what was left of the Catholic Roman Empire in the east and destroyed the Sassanian Persian Empire during the half century after Muhammad’s death.   After that the position, while remaining powerful, diminished in the eyes of the Muslims as it was occupied by a series of corrupt rulers with the title then being tossed around after the destruction of the Abbasid Empire to whomever was the strongest Muslim ruler of the day before finally landing in the lap of the Ottoman Sultans.  They held it for nigh on half a millennium after they conquered Constantinople and the position was finally eliminated by Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the modern Turkish Republic, in 1924.

The importance of this moment will of course only be known in the future.  The Iraqi government is already launching an offensive against the gains made by the Caliphate in northern Iraq but it has brought what can at best be described as mixed results.  This may be a very significant moment or it may be a flash in the pan, but these fighters are determined, cunning, bold, and brutal and that should never be underestimated.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The Turn of Tikrit

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The forces of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant ( الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام) continued a rapid advance south of Mosul today seizing the city of Tikrit (95 miles north of Baghdad) and large parts of the city of Baiji (120 miles north of Baghdad).  Heavy fighting was also reported in the Shi’ite holy city of Samarra (about 60 miles north of Baghdad).  This onslaught means that the ISIL has effectively cut off the highway that runs north of Baghdad through Tikrit, Samarra, and Baiji to Mosul.  Any Iraqi reinforcements sent by the central government in Baghdad will have to fight their way through these cities to wrest Mosul out of the Islamic state’s control.  The only immediated threat to the city at present is the Kurdish peshmerga militia dug in on the east bank of the Tigris River.  Whether the Kurds will seek to intervene on Baghdad’s behalf is doubtful but the possibility shouldn’t be entirely dismissed since the rapid ISIL advance may begin to pose a threat to the stability of the Kurdish region.

It is difficult to imagine the ISIL launching a sustained assault on Baghdad (an urban metropolis of many millions) simply due to their lack of numbers, but this group has proven themselves to be determined, resourceful, audacious, and extremely cunning so I really wouldn’t put anything past them.  And it should be noted that the rapid collapse of Iraqi forces in Mosul and the surrounding region allowed a mass of armored vehicles and even some military helicopters to fall into the hands of ISIL which will aid them greatly in any push on Baghdad.

The world is changing.  I do not know what the end result of this chaos in Iraq will be.  ISIL could advance too far too fast and find themselves vulnerable to counterattack (they seem to have a long exposed flank to the east of Highway 1), but maybe they won’t.  And the longer they can sustain these gains the harder it will be to dislodge them.  And since their ideology to which they are ruthlessly committed is to destroy the borders of the Middle East drawn up by the European powers after the First World War and to replace it with a unified Islamic state this will, if accomplished, create a whole new world.

In any case pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome and for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The Fall of Mosul: the caliphate advances

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It seems that the declaration of a renewed Islamic caliphate in the western Iraqi city of Fallujah last January is something that was far more than a publicity stunt and indeed will need to be taken very seriously.  The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (الدولة الاسلامية في العراق والشام) has apparently taken control of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city of nearly 2 million souls, roughly 200 miles north of Baghdad, roughly in the same location as the ancient capital of the Assyrian empire Ninevah.  This is the same group who declared the caliphate just after the New Year in Fallujah and who have been fighting over a broad swathe of western Iraq and eastern and northern Syria for the past couple of years.  The ISIL has apparently seized the provincial government office in Mosul and several other important sites on the west bank of the Tigris River including the airport (with several military aircraft) and several prisons.  Iraqi security forces are reported to have dropped their weapons, shed their uniforms and fled once the fighting became serious.  Iraqi prime minister Nuri al-Maliki asked his Parliament to declare a nationwide state of emergency and pledged to send reinforcements north to contain the militants.  Mosul is on the edge of the Kurdish autonomous region and its leader Massoud Barzani appealed for international help as thousands of refugees fled to the Kurdish region from the beleaguered city, but he made no commitment for his peshmerga to make any move against ISIL in the city.

Whether this is the start of some new Islamic empire I cannot say, nor can anyone else.  Great movements in history have small beginnings.  The ISIL has seemed to prove itself more effective in Iraq than in Syria where it finds itself at odds with other rebel groups fighting the government of Bashar al Assad, but its influence in Syria should not be underestimated.  In any case they seem to have reduced the Iraq/Syria border to a mere line on a map in many areas and they seem to be quite well armed and funded and if they can succeed in holding Mosul then it will be the greatest propaganda coup in the group’s history.

Chaos is spreading in the Middle East and we are seeing how the efforts of a few well motivated individuals can change the course of history.  But there are other means than guns or bombs or vast military offensives.  These are of the world and must perish as the world perishes.  Prayer and sacrifice and the offering of one’s life through Jesus Christ to the glory of the Father will yield eternal results.  Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome and for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

What is Islam Part 3: Islam’s Roots in Heretical Christianity

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St. John of Damascus, who lived during the age of the first great Islamic onslaught against the Catholic world, wrote in On Heresies that Muhammad “after having chanced upon the Old and New Testaments and likewise, it seems, having conversed with an Arian monk, devised his own heresy.”  This was the first pronouncement from a Catholic source, the last of the Fathers of the Church no less, that Islam might not be as new (Muslim claims to be the primordial religion of mankind not withstanding) or nearly as original idea as it first seemed.  Unfortunately this was also the last of these pronouncements until Hilaire Belloc repeated it our own day just before the Second World War, and it has been dutifully ignored ever since.

So let us examine St. John Damascene’s claim.  The root and core of Islam is the denial of the Trinity which must of course be followed by a denial of the Incarnation.  But the denial of the Trinity was not new in the seventh century.  It was an ancient error by the time of Muhammad.  The heresies that plagued the Church in the age of the Roman Empire all denied the essential unity between God and man that the conjoined natures of Jesus Christ represented and which is only possible to comprehend through the Trinitarian revelations of the New Testament.  So, what does this have to do with Islam?

On the northeast corner of the inside octagonal rim of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the oldest extant Islamic building in the world is written this curious inscription from the Qur’an:

الْمَسِيحُ عِيسَى ابْنُ مَرْيَمَ رَسُولُ اللَّهِ وَكَلِمَتُهُ أَلْقَاهَا إِلَىٰ مَرْيَمَ وَرُوحٌ مِنْهُ ۖ فَآمِنُوا بِاللَّهِ وَرُسُلِهِ ۖ وَلَا تَقُولُوا ثَلَاثَةٌ ۚ انْتَهُوا خَيْرًا لَكُمْ ۚ إِنَّمَا اللَّهُ إِلَٰهٌ وَاحِدٌ ۖ سُبْحَانَهُ أَنْ يَكُونَ لَهُ وَلَدٌ

The Messiah, Jesus, son of Mary, is only a messenger of Allah and His word which He communicated to Mary and a mercy from Him.  So believe in Allah and His messengers.  And say not, Three.  Desist, it is better for you.  Allah is only one God.  Far be it from His glory to have a son (Qur’an 4: 171).

So then, they ancient charge of the Sanhedrin is leveled at the Church: Jesus is not God, there is no Incarnation; God is one so do not proclaim the Trinity to the world.  This charged migrated out from Jewish circles already by the close of the Apostolic Age.  The Gnostics and various others by the close of the first century were already echoing this line of thinking.  They would mostly say that our Lord was pure spirit, that his body was more or less and optical illusion, and of course that he did not form this link between God and man who can only be understood through the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  Later, when the first flush of Gnosticism had run its course the world saw the dawn of Arianism.  Arius, in the early fourth century just following the Edict of Milan, proclaimed our Lord to be a kind of demi-god, and that there was an incarnation of sorts, but not really the Incarnation.  Basically he proclaimed that Jesus Christ was the most powerful created being in the universe, that He was almost God, but that He was not God, that He was created in time.  This doctrine would go on to be adopted by a great swathe of the political elite (including many bishops) in the Empire and later by a number of the barbarian tribes who were coming into what had been the Western Empire and cause a whole host of problems for the Church and for the Roman world.  Many today are confused when they hear or read of the Arian controversy; in our functionally Godless age men scoff at the idea of arguing over the nature of Jesus Christ.  But the problem then is the same is the problem now, though I must say that in that age the Church attacked the issue much more forcefully that it is doing today: if we deny the linking of the divine and human nature in Jesus Christ then we cannot live out the Gospel as it has been revealed to us.  How is a believer supposed to “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Mt. 5: 48)” if we have no link to the Father in Jesus Christ?  This has been the dagger that all heresy, coming in a multitude of guises over the ages, has aimed at the heart of the Church since the beginning.

The Dome of the Rock (taken by me August 3, 2011)

The Dome of the Rock (taken by me August 3, 2011)

Taken inside the Dome of the Rock August 3, 2011

Taken inside the Dome of the Rock August 3, 2011

So then this anti-Trinitarian line from the Qur’an is inscribed upon the oldest still standing Islamic building in the world, a monument whose construction was begun a bare six decades after Muhammad’s death.  This curious anti-Trinitarianism in what was supposedly a newly revealed text was a feature that Islam wanted to parade before the world from its earliest ages.  It features prominently throughout the Qur’an in fact.  And the Qur’an is the direct revelation from Allah to Muhammad through an angel who called himself Gabriel, or so the Muslims say.  But these anti-Trinitarian ideas were not new in the seventh century.  They were in fact quite old by that time, and they sprang not from divine but very human sources going back to the Gnostics of the late first century and even earlier to the Jewish opponents of the nascent Catholic Church, half a millennium before Muhammad was even born.

We have lost many of the writings of the anti-Trinitarian heretics who thrived in the late Roman Empire as they were anathematized by the Church and ultimately destroyed after these heresies were extinguished so there is not too much left to make a comparison with.  There are no records left of Arian liturgies, for example, though they were sung out for three centuries between the Council of Nicaea and the Merovingian rule of Gaul.  There is however a very curious echo between the very early heretical Infancy ‘Gospel’ of Thomas that is dated to the second century AD and a claim made in the Qur’an.  First from the heretical infancy narrative (http://gnosis.org/library/inftoma.htm ):

 1 This little child Jesus when he was five years old was playing at the ford of a brook: and he gathered together the waters that flowed there into pools, and made them straightway clean, and commanded them by his word alone. 2 And having made soft clay, he fashioned thereof twelve sparrows. And it was the Sabbath when he did these things (or made them). And there were also many other little children playing with him.

3 And a certain Jew when he saw what Jesus did, playing upon the Sabbath day, departed straightway and told his father Joseph: Lo, thy child is at the brook, and he hath taken clay and fashioned twelve little birds, and hath polluted the Sabbath day. 4 And Joseph came to the place and saw: and cried out to him, saying: Wherefore doest thou these things on the Sabbath, which it is not lawful to do? But Jesus clapped his hands together and cried out to the sparrows and said to them: Go! and the sparrows took their flight and went away chirping. 5 And when the Jews saw it they were amazed, and departed and told their chief men that which they had seen Jesus do.

Now from the Qur’an:

إِذْ قَالَ اللَّهُ يَا عِيسَى ابْنَ مَرْيَمَ اذْكُرْ نِعْمَتِي عَلَيْكَ وَعَلَىٰ وَالِدَتِكَ إِذْ أَيَّدْتُكَ بِرُوحِ الْقُدُسِ تُكَلِّمُ النَّاسَ فِي الْمَهْدِ وَكَهْلًا ۖ وَإِذْ عَلَّمْتُكَ الْكِتَابَ وَالْحِكْمَةَ وَالتَّوْرَاةَ وَالْإِنْجِيلَ ۖ وَإِذْ تَخْلُقُ مِنَ الطِّينِ كَهَيْئَةِ الطَّيْرِ بِإِذْنِي فَتَنْفُخُ فِيهَا فَتَكُونُ طَيْرًا بِإِذْنِي ۖ وَتُبْرِئُ الْأَكْمَهَ وَالْأَبْرَصَ بِإِذْنِي ۖ وَإِذْ تُخْرِجُ الْمَوْتَىٰ بِإِذْنِي ۖ وَإِذْ كَفَفْتُ بَنِي إِسْرَائِيلَ عَنْكَ إِذْ جِئْتَهُمْ بِالْبَيِّنَاتِ فَقَالَ الَّذِينَ كَفَرُوا مِنْهُمْ إِنْ هَٰذَا إِلَّا سِحْرٌ مُبِينٌ

When Allah will say: O Jesus, son of Mary, remember my favour to thee and to thy mother, when I strengthened thee with the Holy Spirit; thou spokest to people in the cradle and in old age, and when I taught thee the Book and the Wisdom and the Torah and the Gospel, and when thou didst determine out of clay a thing like the form of a bird by My permission, then thou didst breathe into it and it became a bird by My permission; and thou didst heal the blind and the leprous by My permission; and when thou didst raise the dead by My permission; and when I withheld the Children of Israel from thee when thou camest to them with clear arguments – but those of them who disbelieved said: This is nothing but clear enchantment (Qur’an 5: 110).

A fascinating verse from the Qur’an on so many levels! First there is the odd mention of the Holy Spirit (روح القدس), odd for an anti-Trinitarian belief system such as Islam, and not unique to this verse alone.  Perhaps the angel who called himself Gabriel just could not help himself for whatever reason, but I will leave that be.  Our Lord’s miracles are placed firmly in the camp of those of the Oriental wonder-worker who has existed since time immemorial.  The Church has always taught that these miracles were an outward sign of who Jesus Christ is but in Islam Jesus Christ is reduced, as he would certainly have been in Arianism if it had ever gained a permanent foothold, to a mere messenger of God.  Another in the long line of prophets, a man who is to be revered but certainly neither Savior nor Redeemer.  Not the one who was sent by God to save mankind from its distress, and certainly not anyone who would create the link between God and man and fulfill mankind’s destiny; we who were created in the “image and likeness (Gn. 1: 26)” of God.  I have to mention here as well the sly little bit inserted by the angel who called himself Gabriel into this verse about our Lord speaking to people in his “old age”.  Jesus  Christ was crucified, died, rose from the dead, and ascended to heaven during a 53 day period when he was 33 years old, not regarded as ‘old age’ even during the seventh century.  Just another of the Qur’an denials of the founding fact of the Catholic Church: that Jesus Christ really did suffer, die, get buried, rise from the dead, and ascend to the Father to make intercession for the Church until He returns as Judge of that world at the end of time.  In another section of the Qur’an (4:157) a rather vaguely worded assertion was made that Jesus was not crucified at all, that another went in his place; this is a claim that also has roots that predate the Qur’an by centuries and is in fact found in many of the Gnostic ‘gospels’ that were recovered  at Nag Hammadi in 1945.  But I am getting far afield of what I wanted to talk about: the birds.  Let’s get back to the birds.

 All of the other parts of this verse, save the bit about our Lord’s old age, could have been gleaned from the canonical Gospels.  They all record how our Lord healed both the blind and the lepers and how the Spirit was seen (though He had always been there) to have come down upon Him at his Baptism and how his Mother had conceived Him by the Holy Spirit.  But not the birds.  The ‘miracle’ of the birds reduce our Lord to a wonder-worker.  One could I suppose make the argument that our Lord came to give Life to the world and this is true, but our Lord came to breathe Life into men, not birds.  In Genesis man is the only creature into whom God breathes his Life.  The ‘miracle’ of the birds does not fit into that pattern our Lord established in the canonical Gospels.  The evidence shows that it comes from heretical Christian sources that predate the Qur’an by possibly half a millennium and was probably concocted to reduce our Lord to a nothing more than a wonder-worker.  Or who knows?  Maybe the angel who called himself Gabriel spoke this tale to others long before he spoke it to Muhammad?

From this long post I think that we can all agree that there is a mountain of evidence that many features of and ideas expressed in the Qur’an predate the life of Muhammad by a very long time.  Was St. John of Damascus correct in supposing that Muhammad had an Arian monk for a teacher?  We will probably never know.  He probably didn’t need one though that story about Muhammad’s childhood encounter with a monk outside of Damascus that was recounted in the last post does raise an eyebrow.  In any case. the Damascene saint did recognize heretical Christianity when he saw it and he placed Islam firmly in that camp.

So after all that let us just say:

Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritui Sancto!  Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum. Amen.

And pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, the Sorrowful Mysteries on Tuesday for the See of Antioch, the Glorious Mysteries on Wednesday for the See of Jerusalem, the Luminous Mysteries on Thursday for the See of Alexandria, and the Sorrowful Mysteries on Friday for the See of Carthage; for their liberty and their salvation and the restoration of their ancient position as pillars of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome; for the conversion of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Muslim peoples.