Giles Fraser has offered an argument from authority, which is the weakest of all arguments: Christians and Muslims worship the same God because the Pope Francis and the Second Vatican Council say so. In reality, there are immediate and obvious differences: the Trinity, the crucifixion, and the divinity of Christ. Beyond that, Islam in its traditional theological formulations denies free will, the nature of good and evil, and the nature of the deity.
There are numerous passages of the Qur’an, as well as indications from Islamic tradition, to the effect that not only can no one believe in Allah except by his will, so also no one can disbelieve in him except by his active will. “And to whoever God assigns no light, no light has he” (24:40).
The issue of free will versus predestination has, of course, vexed Christians of various sects for centuries, as different biblical passages are given different weight in various traditions. Calvinism, of course, in its pure form is notorious for its doctrine of double predestination, the idea that God has destined people for hell as well as for salvation. But this position is largely unique to them in the Christian tradition, which generally holds that God desires all men and women to be saved, and gives them the means to attain this salvation. The idea that God would create men for hell is in total conflict with the proposition that God “desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:4), and that he “takes no pleasure in the death of anyone” (Ezekiel 18:32).
Allah, by contrast, sends people to hell based not on their deeds, but solely upon his fiat: “And if we had willed, We could have given every soul its guidance, but the word from me will come into effect: I will surely fill hell with jinn and people all together” (Qur’an 32:13).
Another Qur’an passage adds: “We have created for hell many jinn and men: they have hearts, but do not understand with them; they have eyes, but do not perceive with them; they have ears, but they do not hear with them. They are like cattle; nay, rather they are further astray. Those — they are the heedless” (7:179).
In Islamic theological history, a party known as the Qadariyya tried to advance the concept of individual free will. The pioneering Islamic scholar Ignaz Goldziher explains that the Qadaryya were protesting against “an unworthy conception of God,” and yet they “could not find a large body of supporters” among Muslims. Their opponents “battled them with the received interpretation of the sacred scriptures.” And won. Ultimately, Muslim authorities declared the concept of human free will to be heretical. A twelfth-century Muslim jurist, Ibn Abi Ya’la, fulminated that the Qadariyya wrongly “consider that they hold in their grasp the ability to do good and evil, avoid harm and obtain benefit, obey and disobey, and be guided or misguided. They claim that human beings retain full initiative, without any prior status within the will of Allah for their acts, nor even in His knowledge of them.” Even worse, “their doctrine is similar to that of Zoroastrians and Christians. It is the very root of heresy.”
The Christian concept that mankind’s alienation from God is manifested in an inclination toward sin is likewise alien to Islam. In Islam, although Adam and Eve begin in Paradise and are banished from it after their disobedience, and Satan vows to tempt the believers, ultimately even this is a manifestation of Allah’s active will. In the Qur’an, it is only Allah who inspires in the soul both “wickedness and righteousness” (91:8). The world-renowned Pakistani Muslim political leader and theologian Syed Abul Ala Maududi (1902-1979), who wrote a popular and influential commentary on the Qur’an, explains that this verse means that “the Creator has imbedded in man’s nature tendencies and inclinations towards both good and evil.”
That means that Allah is ultimately responsible not just for the soul’s inclination toward good, but for its inclination toward evil as well. In other words, in sharp contrast to the Christian understanding that evil is the rejection of God, in Islam God is the source of evil. This is worlds apart from the proposition that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (I John 1:5) — for to place evil in the soul, Allah must have it to give, which would be utterly impossible and absurd in the Christian conception, since evil is the absence of God.
