A Cheap Religion?
Imam, The Woking Mosque, England.
In our last we tried to dispel one misconception of the Christian mind that God as conceived in Islam is more a symbol of power, reckless and arbitrary towards man, rather than Love as symbolised in the Christian concept of Father. Another equally glaring and un-warranted misunderstanding is that, compared to Christianity, Islam is far less exacting in its demands on man. A Christian missionary, one of the fraternities known as White Fathers who had spent a lifetime in Africa, telling his experiences on the B.B. C., gave this very reason as explanation for the rapid spread of Islam in the Dark Continent. For every one pagan converted to Christianity, he told listeners, four went to Islam. This was not hard to understand, he hastened to add. Whereas it took four years for a pagan to become a Christian, it took just four minutes to become a Muslim. Instead of confessing that Islam was a simple religion to understand, the White Father consoled his Christian audience by telling them that Christianity made demands which an average African found hard to fulfil.
The same line of argument has been taken in the American publication referred to in our last, The Religions of the World Made Simple, in its article on Islam.
It says:
”Islam is a faith adapted to the requirements of the average man, and definitely not making the excessive demands associated with Christianity. It involves very clear and limited commands which any man can obey. It makes no such searching claim for a fundamental reformation of character as we find in the Christian faith. One result is the relative success of Islam as compared with Christianity over the mass of its adherents, Christianity having been found by many too difficult to put into practice”.
When a Christian talks like that, one fails to understand what exactly he has in his mind. What particular teaching of Christianity makes greater moral demands on man than Islam? As a matter of fact, the easy path would seem to lie in Christianity, Islam wants it followers to go five times a day to the mosques to worship God, as against one weekly Service of Christianity. The other very rigorous time-honoured religious institution, Fasting, which was observed by Jesus himself, has been altogether discarded by Christianity. But Islam is very strict in this demand on its followers. Not only the duration is very long – a whole month; the restrictions imposed on man’s elementary creature needs are taxing to the utmost limit. An African bushman would certainly find little charm in being called upon in the burning heat of summer to go without a drink the whole day long. Islam makes further demand which is the hardest. A Muslim must share his earnings with his fellow men, and part with a prescribed percentage of it with the needy. Islam is keen on this (Zakat) that it makes it the very touchstone of Faith. Jeus himself has been described in the Quran as very strict in the observance of Salaat (prayer) and payment of Zakat. Christianity has no such demand to make on the pocket of its followers. Nor does Islam pander to another common weakness of the flesh – alcoholic drinks. Islam is the greatest temperance society. To have eradicated the evil of drink is indeed one of its greatest achievements, as acknowledged by some great Western thinkers. How hard it is to abolish drink may be judged from the fact that wherever the experiments were tried, it failed. Christianity as a religion, not only does not forbid this dangerous habit; it puts a premium on it by attributing to Jesus the miracle of having converted water into wine, and by making wine-taking an indispensable ingredient in the most sacred of its rites. If any easy-going life were the standard for a choice between Islam and Christianity, the odds lie heavily in favour of Christianity.
In a poverty-ridden society, Christianity with the vast material resources at its back, has a positive attraction: it is an easy steppingstone to economic benefits. To the African, Christianity, most often, means a job and social position; to become a Muslim is likely to lose the job. It is an absolutely empty claim to say that Christianity makes any very heavy demands on man compared to Islam. The fact of the matter lies the other way about. It is a release from so many irksome obligations. That is the significance of the Church creed which makes salvation exclusively a matter of grace through Jesus’ blood. Islam brackets good deeds with faith, and unless both are there, there is no salvation. A religion whose only demand is to believe in Jesus’ blood and gives a blank cheque to lead whatever life one may, cannot very well claim to make too high demands on man, compared to Islam which means observance of law at every step of life.
There is, however, one demand of Christianity which is no doubt very heavy. Its creed is a jumble of puzzles which no mortal understanding can easily comprehend. Trinity, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Ascension, Atonement – the Five Pillars on which Christianity stands – are one and all mere presumptions, which a Christian is required to take for granted. Of these only one, Crucifixion, may be said to have some reality, though only as an event in history, not as part of a so-called Divine Scheme for man’s salvation. All the rest are just a story which has been woven around this simple event – the creation of pure fancy. There is not a shred of evidence in support of the theory that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost (all equal partners in Godhead) held to save a sinning humanity, that they decided to send the Son to the earth to pay the price of man’s sins by dying on the Cross, and that it was in accordance with that preconceived plan that Jesus mounted the Cross. The evidence goes entirely against this presumption. The very fact that he was forced to mount the Cross against his wish, demolishes the hypothesis as to its being a preconceived plan. As to Resurrection, the evidence shows it to have been a man-made plot at the secret rescue of Jesus, rather than miraculous happening. As to the Ascension, nobody ever saw Jesus go bodily up in the air. Disappearance in clouds while ascending a mountain is a common phenomenon, which flight of fancy converted in the case of Jesus into an airlift to heaven. Atonement follows as an arbitrary sequence to events which never took place.
Small wonder if even the bushman of Africa finds these stories little different from his own primitive superstitions. This is a demand which is repugnant even to the plain common-sense of the pagan in Africa, whereas the simple creed of Islam has only to be stated to be understood and grip the meanest intelligence. There lies the appeal of Islam not only in Africa but to mankind at large. One God, One universal family of mankind, no racial or colour discriminations, universal equality of man, no priesthood, no magical formulas for salvation, salvation equally open to the highest and the humblest on personal merit which lies in a clear, honest, helpful life, spending one’s earning on the needy, helping those in distress – these are some of the highlights of the Islamic way of life, and is there a human mind, in the highly advanced West as in the bushland of Africa which can resist the dynamic grip of such a simple, such a common-sense, and such a human and humane religion?
To put the whole in a nutshell, Christianity, so far as the creed is concerned, is a religion of stories, Islam a religion of practical common-sense and daily life. This is not to depreciate the good that one finds among the Christian peoples. If the writer in the American publication were to claim superiority for the present-day Christian peoples over the Muslim peoples, he would have had some solid ground to stand upon. But when he talks of the “higher” demands of Christianity compared to those of Islam, he, as detailed above, has a very poor case to plead.
The correct description of Islam in comparison with Christianity is that it is a simple religion, a practical and practicable religion. It is a gross travesty of facts to say that Islam is a cheap religion and that is why it has a greater appeal to the masses in Africa and elsewhere. We must, however, add that on the whole this misconception of the Christian mind is neither deliberate nor planned. It is born of ignorance of the true teachings of Islam. As such Muslims, rather than show temper at every such mistaken representation of Islam by Christians, should face the bitter truth that the blame lies more with themselves for doing nothing to enlighten people’s minds in the West about Islam. Each distortion of Islam in Western publications should come as a fresh challenge to Muslims to do their duty to take the true picture of Islam to the West – a duty which the Quran imposes on every Muslim.
M.Y.K.
(The Light – November 8, 1960)
