ABSTRACT
There is a significant difference between a reflection on Christian anti-Muslim polemic and a consideration of the dynamics that underlie that same polemic: the first is an analysis of what a Christian has said about Islam (and vice versa), which can often include inaccurate depictions of Islam and misrepresentations of theological ideas; the second is an attempt to understand the reasons why Christian and Muslim theologians simply could not accept or even comprehend the other’s theological position. It can be difficult to disentangle the two approaches, but in many cases this distinction can be seen in Christian reflections on Muslim anti-Christian polemic. For example, in his Cur Deus homo? Anselm writes:
And this question, both infidels are accustomed to bring up against us, ridiculing Christian simplicity as absurd; and many believers ponder it in their hearts: for what cause or necessity, in sooth, God became man, and by his own death, as we believe and affirm, restored life to the world; when he might have done this by means of some other being, angelic or human, or merely by his will.
(1962: 192–3) By infidels, Anselm is addressing Jews (Asiedu 2001: 533), but the same position can be extended to Muslims as an implicit critique of Muslim belief, since Jews and Muslims made similar attacks against the Christian theologies of the incarnation and redemption. In this short passage, Anselm is expressing the theological dynamic that lies beneath all Christian relations with Judaism and, by extension, Islam. At the centre of the Christian faith is a belief – Anselm states it is something that Christians ‘believe and confess’ (nos credimus et confitemur) – that God needed to become human in order to ‘restore life to the world’ (mundo vitam reddiderit). Muslim sources, including the Qurʾān, also talk about God restoring life to the world (see O’Shaughnessy 1985: 70–89), though for Muslim theologians this did not require the incarnation of God. In this short passage, Anselm alludes to the fact that God’s redemption of the world did not necessarily have to take the form of the incarnation and self-sacrifice, since he states that in restoring life to the world, ‘he might have done this by means of some other being, angelic or human, or merely by his will’. Muslim theologians would find the latter – ‘merely by his will’ (sola voluntate) – to be the only theologically acceptable mechanism for ‘restoring life to the world’.