© 1981 Jeff Wattles
© 1981 The Urantia Book Fellowship (formerly Urantia Brotherhood)
The spiritual renaissance on our planet is like a series of four waves on a lake, emanating from a common center, expanding to realize the brotherhood of man. A freshened quest for truth, beauty, and goodness ripples through the experience of many a humanist. Strong currents of monotheistic devotion stir the souls of countless spiritual descendants of Melchizedek’s gospel. Many Christians are seeking and finding the water of life, the true spirit of the Master’s gift to us. And the movement of students of The URANTIA Book carries the potential to integrate these concentric circles of realization. The purpose of this essay is to enhance our understanding and our brotherhood with Muslims.
If the steps in the growth of love are understanding. service, and wisdom, we may begin with the question, what is Islam?
The first associations that come to mind include holy wars, polygamy, the subjugation of women, taboos on pork and alcohol, fanatic revolutionary movements, and the politics of oil. We have heard of sufi mystics identifying with God and of extreme legalists, such as the pious scholar who refused to eat a watermelon because he could not determine from scripture how the Prophet would have eaten one. We know that the union of religious and political authority is a pattern based on the life of Muhammed and is common in Islam today.
The word Islam connotes peace and denotes submission, namely, to the will of God. Islam teaches a God of justice to be feared and a God of mercy to be loved. It has a concept of the brotherhood of all humankind, but emphasizes primarily the brotherhood of the followers of Islam. To get to the root of this tradition, we must grasp the meaning of its monotheism. Ask a Muslim what he believes, and four times out of five you will get this reply: “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammed is his prophet.” While, for an articulate monotheism, the oneness of God is capable of including diversity, for a simple monotheism, the unity of God flatly excludes multiplicity, In Islam, God has ninety-nine names and performs multiple actions-he is The Exalter and The Abaser, The Expediter and The Delayer. The Giver of Life and The Creator of Death, The Manifest and The Hidden-but God, as a Creator personality, is alone.
The alert student of The URANTIA Book will recognize here the heritage of Melchizedek’s revelation, and he will be delighted to discover that salvation in Islam is grasped as the reward of faith. What the alert student might not understand at first is that the proclamation of the one God is intended to deny the divinity of Christ as much as it is intended to deny every obvious and subtle form of polytheism and idolatry.
The Qur’an teaches that Allah has neither father nor mother, neither brother nor sister, neither son nor daughter. The original motivation for this denial is obvious when we imagine the polytheistic climate of seventh century Arabia into which the prophet Muhammed burst. The point of insisting on the unity of God is that (1) God needs no helpers in creation; (2) the universe is not run by a committee but directed by a single will with a unified purpose; and (3) no being, visible or invisible, powerful or lowly, can act independently of God. I have yet to meet the Muslim who can grasp that what I believe about Jesus is compatible with the essential thrust of their teaching of the one God.
Muslims have associations with the term Father that are most important for us to understand. Once, after a humanities class in which I referred to the Fatherhood of God, a Muslim student came and asked, “What picture of God do you have in your mind?” I tried to come up with a helpful answer, but could only say, “I really don’t have a picture in my mind at all.” He said, “Oh, we were told that westerners think of God as an old man with a beard, and when you referred to Allah as Father I thought that’s what you meant,” I said, “When I call God Father I mean to indicate God’s sourceness, personality, and intimacy.” He advised, “You should definitely explain that when you use this word.” To him the word Father sounded anthropomorphic.
Muslims assume when they hear Christians or nearChristians refer to God as Father they mean the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, It is, therefore, difficult for a student of our book to avoid bringing up the issue of the nature of Jesus when speaking about the Father with Muslims, But I take hope from the following experience: I was invited to dinner with other Muslims at the home of a student from Saudi Arabia. At dinner his wife, an American convert to Islam, said to me, “Don’t you think it spoils the unity of God to think of him having a son?” Referring to her husband, I said, “Do you think the unity of Bakr is spoiled if he has a son?” There was silence all around the table, and no one made an objection.
Muslims think that Christians think that God quasiphysically impregnated Mary. They insist that Allah is not a Father. Mary was a virgin, they say, but she became pregnant merely by divine command. God says, “Be!” and the thing is. Jesus they respect as a prophet of
Islam, more ascetic and militant than the gospels show, He did not die on the cross-a person who resembled him was substituted for him. Jesus was taken directly to heaven, and we will see him again on Judgment Day. Jesus was God’s messenger to his specific time and place. Muhammed’s prophethood is declared to be universally valid for all time.
For Islam to survive as a major world religion, it must make continued progress towards a liberal option. Many sufis are beacons of God-consciousness who respect no dam of cemented tradition on the river of love. In Turkey, religion no longer dominates politics, though conservative religious parties are strong; and women are politically liberated. The Iranian teacher Ali Shari’ati presented the clearest concepts of the meaning of human freedom, the equality of men and women, and the brotherhood of all humankind, I have even heard of a group called Muslims for Jesus.
This is a time of great testing for Islam. The religion is currently tied to a legal system which is tied to the social structure of Arabia 1400 years ago. Many Muslims who enjoy a glass of wine and no longer pray five times a day are ceasing to regard themselves as Muslims. The prayer ritual is often devoid of true prayer. It is probably safe to say that a majority of professed Muslims are unwitting secularists. The sudden wealth of the OPEC countries and interaction with the West have encouraged both apostasy and a strong defensive reaction.
The augmented power of the Islamic peoples in the twentieth century has revived a popular ambition to conquer the world. They have been making converts among every race, especially in Africa. Once there were twice as many Christians as Muslims in Africa; in twenty years there may be twice as many Muslims as Christians. Islam has four great strengths as they compete with Christianity today: (1) Muslims have an excellent record on race. The Qur’an recognizes the equality of all peoples of whatever color or class; one of Muhammed’s wives was black. (2) They are not associated with western civilization, which they regard as corrupt and dying, reaping the harvest of political and economic greed. (3) Their teaching about God and Jesus is easy to understand. (4) They are preaching the one God with vividness and clarity and power.
What can we offer to Muslims? The more we learn of history, the more we appreciate the genius of the revelators in highlighting the concept of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. The evolution of Islam, I think, will require (1) recognition of the experience of sonship with the universal Father of all humankind; (2) a clarified distinction of the essence of religion from ritual, (3) the gradual separation of religion from politics, and, (4) a modified regard for the Qur’an analogous to the regard for the Bible among liberal Christians.
More than advanced understanding of religion, we can offer the hand of fellowship to our monotheistic brothers. It is unavoidable that each group regards its beliefs as superior. What distinguishes the true believer is how those beliefs are practiced.
Finally, let us refresh our sense of brotherhood with sincere Muslims with some quotations from the Qur’an:
“Give glory to Allah morning and evening. Praise be to him in the heavens and the earth, at twilight and at noon.”
“We created man. We know the promptings of his soul. We are closer to him than the vein of his neck.”
“As for him that desires the life to come and strives for it with all his soul, his endeavors shall be rewarded by Allah.”
“Have we not given him two eyes, a tongue, and two lips and shown him the two paths? Yet he would not scale the Height. Would that you knew what the Height is! It is the freeing of a bondsman; the feeding, in the day of a famine, of an orphaned relation or a needy man in distress; to have faith and to enjoin fortitude and mercy.”
— Jeffrey Wattles
Berkeley, California