In February 1989, the Ayotallah Khomeini delivered his infamous fatwa (the formal opinion of a Muslim canon lawyer) against Salman Rushdie, the author of Satanic Verses.
As a quick historical review, during the prophet Muhammad's days in Mecca, before he was run out of town and took his flight to Medina, Muhammad was sitting with some eminent men of Mecca next to the Kaaba, the cube like building in the middle of the center of the mosque at Mecca. There he began to recite sura 53, which describes Gabriel's first visit to Muhammad and then goes on to the second visit:
He also saw him (Gabriel) another time
By the Lote tree at the furthest boundary
Near to which is the Paradise of rest,
When the Lote tree covered that which is covered,
His sight turned not aside, neither did it wander
And verily he beheld some of the greatest Signs of his Lord
What do you think of Lat and Uzza
And Manat the third beside?
At this point we are told that Satan himself put into Muhammad's mouth words of reconciliation and compromise:
These are exalted Females
Whose intercession verily is to be sought after.
The Meccans were overjoyed at this recognition of their deities and are said to have prayed with the Muslims, the early followers of Muhammad. But supposedly, Gabriel paid another visit to the Prophet, scolded Muhammad, and told him that the true ending to the verse should have been:
What! shall there be male progeny unto you, and female unto Him?
That were indeed an unjust partition!
They are naught but names, which ye and your fathers have invented.
Muslims have always been uncomfortable with this story, unwilling to believe that the "monotheistic" Prophet could have made such a concession to idolatry. Actually, this was not a slip of the tongue by Muhammad. This was a calculated attempt to win the support of the pagan Meccans to Muhammad's eclectic religion. When the Meccans failed to follow in line, Muhammad reversed course, and blamed Satan for inspiring him to say the original lines.
If Satan truly had been these words in Muhammad's mouth, how can anyone put faith in a man so easily led astray? How could God allow that to happen? How do we know if there not other passages in the Koran where Muhammad had not been led astray?
For Salman Rushdie to pursue this line of thought and state the obvious from Muhammad's inglorious past, he was deemed as good as dead. Mr. Rushdie became a fugitive on the run from the long reach of the Muslim law.
At the same time, a glaring inconsistency existed, even to this day. Christian end-time soothsayers in our country have recently nominated Libyan President, Mu'ammar al-Qaddafi, as a possible candidate for the post of Antichrist. Other candidates have come and gone through the years, but the nominations will keep pouring in until somebody will finally get it right, supposedly.
But the surprising thing about al-Qaddafi is that he is anything but a faithful Muslim. His public statements on the Prophet, the Koran and Islam in general amount to a blasphemy far greater than anything written by Salman Rushdie. He changed the Islamic calendar, mocked Meccan pilgrims as "guileless and foolish", criticized the prophet Muhammad, and claimed that his own achievements in Libya were far greater than those of the Prophet. He has shown extreme skepticism about the truth of the Koran and even about the details of the life of the Prophet. Though religious leaders found al-Qaddafi anti-Islamic and deviant, and condemned his "perjury and lies," there were no calls for his death, nor were any of his writings banned.
Today there is an uprising in Libya, as there is in other parts of the Middle East. The protesters in Libya have discovered, though, that it is a much harder job to dislodge their leader than in the case of Egypt's Mubarek, another previous candidate for the post of Antichrist. This has led many to assume that the protesters are a more radical group of Muslims who finally want to instill an Iranian-type Islamic state. NATO has gotten involved, along with American air forces, and the time may come when ground forces will be sent in to remove the Libyan leader from power. The question remains, though, why has it taken so long for Muslim leaders to take al-Qaddafi to task for his anti-Islamic rants through the decades?
One explanation is that in Islam and in Muhammad's own life there are a countless number of inconsistencies and contradictions, all because "the end justifies the means."
Ibn Warraq in his book Why I Am Not a Muslim reminds us we need to distinguish three Islams: Islam 1 is the what the Prophet taught as contained in the Koran, Islam 2 is the religion as expounded, interpreted and developed by the theologians through the traditions (Hadith), which includes the sharia and Islamic law, Islam 3 is what Muslims actually did do and achieve, or to put it in other words, Islamic civilization. (Do you see the familiarity with what Jesus had to face in His day with his ongoing confrontations with the Pharisees and scribes?) Trying to reconcile all three strands of Islam will cause any critical thinker to have unending migraines.
For starters, Muhammad did not invent a new religion. He was basically jealous that his tribe in Mecca did not have a monotheistic religion like the Jews and the Christians. Inside the Kaaba there were 360 idols, for instance. What Muhammad did was draft the moon god "Allah" into becoming the One Supreme God, and then from there he borrowed pagan practices left and right, much of it from Zoroastrianism, to fit them into his home-brew concoction of Islam.
Islam does not allow for critical analysis. Everything is to be accepted by blind faith. When one dares to question anything about Muhammad's life, his sayings, the Koran or Hadith, or the religion of Islam in general, that person becomes a marked man, ala Salman Rushdie. In contrast, Christianity invites critical thinking and probing investigation, because the truth has nothing to fear.
Because Europe and the United States have been swept off her feet by growing secular humanistic ideology the past two centuries, they no longer have the stomach and mind to recognize the danger that Islam imposes. The United States is not far behind Europe in so many ways. Have you ever wondered why since 9/11 there is the inexplicable attempt on the part of the political, academic, media and religious establishment to defend and even promote "peaceful" Islam at all costs? How can the National Organization for Women remain silent, for example, about how women in Islamic countries are treated? Such is the case, though.
I have often wondered about the "COEXIST" bumper stickers I see on vehicles. Is it just by accident that the first letter C represents Islam, whereas the last letter T represents Christianity? Hmm. But more to the point, what are the chances that we would find a COEXIST bumper sticker on a vehicle in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Turkey, et. al.? A rational person would have to conclude that we don't have much problems with "coexisting" in the United States. (How many Muslims have been persecuted, beaten, imprisoned, killed in this country, and how many mosques here have been bombed or burned to the ground? Compare that number to Christians and churches in Islamic countries.) It seems that the Islamic countries didn't get the memo yet on peaceful, tolerant coexistence.
In the United Kingdom, where Prince William got married today (finally!), there are more Muslim mosques than Methodist churches. Islam is the fastest growing religion in Europe. Many European leaders are afraid to make a move due to how it may upset the Muslims in their respective countries. Witness how Spain quickly withdrew its armed forces from the Iraqi war, all because of a terrorist attack on a train.
Where did this "bend-over-backwards-to-appease" Islam attitude develop in Europe? In the sixteenth century, when Europe began to explore other parts of the world, the notion of the "noble savage" was first fully developed. That included Muslims in Africa, the Middle East and the Far East. The seventeenth century saw the first truly sympathetic accounts of Islam. Compared to the Catholic Church, for example, Pierre Bayle would comment: "The Muslims have always had more humanity for other religions than the Christians." The Crusades, going back several centuries, were the Catholic Church's attempt to outdo the Muslim jihad. This had a lasting negative hangover in the minds of the intellectual class in Europe.
George Sale in his translation of the Koran in 1734 firmly believed that the Arabs "seem to have been raised up on purpose by God, to be a scourge to the Christian church, for not living answerably to that most holy religion which they had received." In other words, Islam was a means of divine judgment upon the Christian church. Had the church lived up to its ideals, then Islam would not have succeeded so much. That was the estimation of many at the time.
It was Voltaire, the French atheist, that got the pro-Islamic, anti-Christian ball rolling at full speed. To Voltaire, the God of Christianity was a "cruel and hateful tyrant" who "surely cannot have been born of a girl, nor died on the gibbet, nor be eaten in a piece of dough" and nor could he have inspired "books filled with contradictions, madness and horror."
By contrast, Voltaire found the dogmas of Islam very simple: there is but one God, and Muhammad is his Prophet. There were no priests, no miracles, no mysteries. This appealed to the anti-supernatural bent of people like Voltaire. The historian Gibbon, who wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, painted Islam in a favorable light, especially as contrasted to Christianity. The anticlerical Gibbon jumped on Islam's bandwagon because it provided more ammunition is his own disdain for the doctrine of the divinity of Christ. Gibbon's deistic view of Islam as a rational, priest-free religion, with Muhammad as a wise and tolerant lawgiver, enormously influenced the way all Europeans perceived their new sister religion for years to come.
A familiar pattern was emerging in Europe in the late 1700s and into the 1800s--Islam was being used as a weapon by a growing number of movers and shakers in European society to mock and to attack Christianity. Many of the European apologists of Islam had not proper acquaintance with the Arabic sources of Islam; most had only a superficial knowledge of their subject. They simply used Islam as a convenient weapon against intolerance, cruelty, dogma, the clergy and Christianity.
This is where we are today. Christianity is the whipping boy; Islam is the whipper.
So. . .is the Antichrist an Islamic religious-political figure who may be on the scene now, or who will appear soon? It is reported that Glenn Beck has suggested as much. The 12th iman will reappear, and in Islamic theology his likeness is comparable to the Antichrist we read about in the New Testament. So the reasoning goes. But what does the Bible say about the Antichrist? Surprisingly, the Bible paints a totally different picture of the antichrists or an antichrist than that that has been popularized through evangelical or even Mormon circles.
Yours in Christ,
Chris
