Islam

Five Easy Proofs.

May 12, 2024 - 10 minute read -
Islam

Atonement for Sin

Old Testament laws specifies that there is no sacrifice to atone for intentional sins (Num. 15:30–31). In the post-Temple period, however, Jews do not make sacrifices to atone for sin (intentional or not); instead, they perform teshuvah.1 The Talmud specifies that certain severe sins can only be atoned for with suffering or suffering and death.2 Maimonides encodes this principle in his Mishneh Torah.3

The Buddha seems to believe that it is impossible for bad conduct to have an agreeable result and for good conduct to have a disagreeable result,4 and he further specifies that it is not possible to achieve nibbana without having experienced the sum total of one’s kamma.5

Catholics believe mortal sins (so called) must be confessed verbally to another human being to expiate the punishment of eternal damnation (i.e., hell). Once the eternal punishment is dealt with, the penitent must perform a penance to expiate the punishment of temporal damnation (i.e., purgatory). Venial sins (so called) seem to require only penance and ensure purgatory if unexpiated (though I’m unsure how a Catholic would receive a penance without verbally confessing their venial sin in the first place).

Protestants generally do away with mandated verbal confession of sin and instead thread their thought of forgiveness for sin through the remembrance of Jesus’s ﵇ death.

What do the aforementioned perspectives have in common? They do not believe in what Kierkegaard would call the teleological suspension of the ethical;6 that is, they do not believe that God ﷾ can forgive sins “without keeping score” (i.e., by suspending punishment completely).

But Muslims do believe God can forgive sins without requiring either eternal or temporal expiation of any kind.7

Returning to Buddhism, it seems like the Buddhist tantras over time did away with the ethical objectivity of the Pali canon and instead asserted a form of theological voluntarism wherein every sin—including the so-called five boundless crimes8—was forgivable except for (paraphrasing) blaming one’s Teacher,9 which of course is a coded assertion that tawhid, or monotheism, is the supreme virtue, and shirk, or idolatry, is the supreme sin.

Thus, in the end, every religion became Islam, especially given Luther’s revolt against the “tyranny” (my words) of the Catholic sacrament of penance and Catholicism’s adoption of private confession of sin over the public penance required by the early church.

If we were to summarize this “proof,” it would be that Muslims—I am meaning Ash’aris qua Sunnis qua Muslims as a whole—believe God ﷾ can forgive sins at will without the use of an external aid. Thus, Muslims hold the highest, most flattering opinion of God ﷾; whereas Christians, for example, believe God ﷾ had to put at least someone to death.

History

Muhammad ﷺ was the last individual to found a major world religion and therefore the last prophet.

Usually people raise three categories of objection to the aforementioned claim:

  • Bahá’í Faith, Mormonism, Scientology, Theosophical Society, and the like
  • Kagyu, Gaudiya Vaishnavism, Protestantism, and the like
  • Sikhism

The answer to the first category (Bahá’í Faith etc.) is that these so-called new religions are actually manmade cults formed by dajjals with numerically insignificant numbers of followers. Typically they have very bad theology. For example, most of the world religions are united on the idea that the worst sin is disbelief (the Abrahamic religions)10, or ignorance (Buddhism11 and Hinduism12). (These are synonymous concepts.) Instead, Mormonism inverts all this and declares murder to be the worst sin.

The answer to the second category (Kagyu etc.) is that these are not new world religions but newly formed branches, denominations, or sects within major world religions that preexisted Islam.

The answer to the third category is that Sikhism is the confluence of Hindu and Islamic thought and therefore not a new religion. Sikhs might take umbrage at this, but the founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak, actually mentions both Hinduism and Islam when beginning his public mission—There is no Hindu and no Musalman13—so it’s clear he somehow defined Sikhism in contradistinction to Hinduism and Islam, which means that Sikhism is in some sense relationally defined with respect to Hinduism and Islam or perhaps derivative of them.

If we were to summarize this “proof,” it would be that Muhammad’s ﷺ claim to being the last prophet seems vindicated by history.

Intrusion of Greek Thought

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, Muslim philosophers were the first to recover Aristotle. They were, in the end, also the first to do away with Aristotle. Much of medieval Jewish and Christian philosophy was directly inspired, probably, by Alfarabi ﵁, Avicenna ﵁, and Averroes ﵁.14 Alfarabi ﵁ was in many respects the font of Aristotelianism for the Muslim philosophers who came after him15 and therefore the Jewish and Christian philosophers who followed those Muslim philosophers.

But while Maimonides went down in history as the second Moses,16 the Muslims collectively ousted the philosophers (falasifa) from their midst and encoded the extreme theological voluntarism of al-Ash’ari ﵁—that is, God ﷾ is all powerful, and whatever he ﷾ says, goes—as being representative of their religion. Thanks, al-Ghazali ﵁!

On the Christian side, the Catholic Church largely adopted Aquinas’s philosophy, which to my understanding is essentially Aristotelianism. Luther, on the other hand, sought to undermine the intrusion of Greek philosophy into Christian theology and subordinate philosophy to theology.

Given Judaism’s polyvocal nature, it’s unlikely that there has ever been something resembling a unified consensus within the Jewish community in regards to doctrine. One might, for example, consider the multiple distinct interpretations of Genesis 22.17

And given the Muslim Ummah’s ability to completely and collectively do away with Greek thought with respect to their faith, we can believe the Prophet’s ﷺ prediction that his ﷺ nation will not unite on misguidance, so if you see them differing, follow the great majority, to be true.18 Conversely, this sort of united decision-making did not occur for Judaism or Christianity. Judaism remains multivocal in nature, and while its history is absolutely littered with brilliant thinkers, and Maimonides’s legacy remains strong, we cannot say that Jews as a whole are reconciled with respect to their doctrine (see, for example, Hasidism and Kabbalah). The Christians seems divided down the middle with respect to the debate between intellectualism and voluntarism: Catholics appear to identify with the former and Protestants with the latter.

If we were to summarize this “proof,” it would be that the Muslim community as a whole was able to unite and agree on matters of theological doctrine. The most stunning example of this was Ash’arism’s univocal ejecting of Greek philosophy from the fold of Islam. Christianity remains divided down the middle regarding the use of Greek thought with theology (Thomism qua Catholicism vs. Lutheranism qua Protestantism). Judaism remains decentralized and multivocal regarding its dogma.

And even more terse summary is simply that Judaism has never enjoyed doctrinal and theological unity across its diaspora—there is simply no Jewish ijma’, so to speak. Christianity was split down the middle: Catholicism on the one hand and Protestantism on the other. Islam alone has retained largely undivided unity with regards to both its praxis and theology in its capacity as Sunnism.

And Allah ﷾ knows best.

Footnotes

  1. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, trans. Eliyahu Touger (n.p.: Moznaim, n.d.), Repentance 1.3, https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.1.3. ↵
  2. The William Davidson Talmud, trans. Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz (n.p.: Koren, n.d.), Yoma 86a, https://www.sefaria.org/Yoma.86a. ↵
  3. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Repentance 1.4, https://www.sefaria.org/Mishneh_Torah%2C_Repentance.1.4. ↵
  4. Numbered Discourses: A Sensible Translation of the Aṅguttara Nikāya, trans. Bhikkhu Sujato (Eastwood, AU: SuttaCentral, 2018): 1:47. ↵
  5. Numbered Discourses, 5:250–258. ↵
  6. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, and Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Kierkegaard’s Writings 6 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 54. ↵
  7. Perhaps I use the eternal ironically, but some Muslims believe that sinning believers might be punished with a temporary stay in hell for expiatory purposes. By temporal I mean earthly suffering of some kind. It is possible that God will forgive him (jawāz al-maghfirah) and that he will enter Paradise without further ado. Christian Lange, “Sins, Expiation, and Non-Rationality in Ḥanafī and Shāfiʿī Fiqh,” in Islamic Law in Theory: Studies on Jurisprudence in Honor of Bernard Weiss, eds. A. Kevin Reinhart and Robert Gleave, Studies in Islamic Law and Society 37 (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2014), 162. ↵
  8. Rigpa Wiki, s.v. “Five crimes with immediate retribution,” lasted edited , https://www.rigpawiki.org/index.php?title=Five_crimes_with_immediate_retribution. ↵
  9. Francesca Fremantle, “A Critical Study of the Guhyasamāja Tantra” (PhD diss., University of London, 1971), 41. ↵
  10. Indeed, Allah does not forgive associating others with Him ˹in worship˺, but forgives anything else of whoever He wills. And whoever associates others with Allah has indeed committed a grave sin. Qur’an 4:48 (The Clear Quran, trans. Mustafa Khattab), https://quran.com/an-nisa/48. Compare to the Rom. 14:23 (New International Version): and everything that does not come from faith is sin. ↵
  11. Mendicants, ignorance precedes the attainment of unskillful qualities, with lack of conscience and prudence following along. An ignoramus, sunk in ignorance, gives rise to wrong view. Wrong view gives rise to wrong thought. Wrong thought gives rise to wrong speech. Wrong speech gives rise to wrong action. Wrong action gives rise to wrong livelihood. Wrong livelihood gives rise to wrong effort. Wrong effort gives rise to wrong mindfulness. Wrong mindfulness gives rise to wrong immersion. Linked Discourses: A Plain Translation of the Saṁyutta Nikāya, trans. Bhikkhu Sujato (Eastwood, AU: SuttaCentral, 2018), 5:3. ↵
  12. Even if thou shouldst be the most sinful of all sinners, thou shalt cross over all evil by the boat of wisdom alone. Bhagavad Gita 4:36 (Bhagavadgītā, trans. Radhakrishnan, 2nd ed. [London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949], 171). ↵
  13. SikhiWiki, s.v. “There is no Hindu and no Musalman,” last edited , https://www.sikhiwiki.org/index.php/There_is_no_Hindu_and_no_Musalman. ↵
  14. Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect, and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); The most important writer to be rediscovered during this period was Aristotle. As a result of Augustine’s enormous influence, early Christian theology had drawn its philosophical inspiration almost entirely from Plato and Neoplatonism. In the East, by contrast, Arabic philosophers took Aristotle as their guide. The recovery of Aristotle sent shockwaves through European intellectual communities. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 51; Sarah Pessin, “The Influence of Islamic Thought on Maimonides,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, article first published June 30, 2005, substantive revision May 28, 2014, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/maimonides-islamic/. ↵
  15. A direct line of development is easily traced from Alfarabi to Avicenna, and then forward to Averroes, but when one looks back beyond Alfarabi, no immediate predecessor appears. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, 5. ↵
  16. Richard N. Ostling, “Religion: Honoring the Second Moses,” Time, December 23, 1985, https://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,960453,00.html. ↵
  17. Albert van der Heide, ‘Now I Know’: Five Centuries of Aqedah Exegesis, Amsterdam Studies in Jewish Philosophy 17 (Cham, CH: Springer, 2017); James A. Diamond, “Abarbanel’s Exegetical Subversion of Maimonides’ ʿAqedah: Transforming a Knight of Intellectual Virtue into a Knight of Existential Faith,” in The Hebrew Bible in Fifteenth-Century Spain: Exegesis, Literature, Philosophy, and the Arts, eds. Jonathan Decter and Arturo Prats, Études sur le Judaïsme Médiéval 54 (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2012), 75–100. ↵
  18. Imâm Muhammad Bin Yazeed Ibn Majah Al-Qazwinî, comp., English Translation of “Sunan Ibn Mâjah,” eds. Hâfiz Abu Tâhir Zubair ‘Ali Za’i, Huda Khattab, and Abu Khaliyl, trans. Nasiruddin al-Khattab (Riyadh, SA: Darussalam, 2007), 5:174–175. ↵