Power: Divine and Human

Christian and Muslim Perspectives

Lucinda Mosher, David Marshall

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781626167308
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

This volume of the Building Bridges Seminar, Power: Divine and Human, Christian and Muslim Perspectives, comprises pairs of essays by Christians and Muslims which introduce texts for dialogical study, plus the actual text-excerpts themselves.

This new book goes far beyond mere reporting on a dialogical seminar; rather, it provides guidance and materials for constructing a similar dialogical experience on a particular topic. As a resource for comparative theology, Power: Divine and Human is unique in that it takes up a topic not usually explored in depth in Christian-Muslim conversations. It is written by scholars for scholars. However, in tone and structure, it is suitable for the non-specialist as well. Students (undergraduate and graduate), religious leaders, and motivated non-specialists will find it readable and useful. While it falls solidly in the domain of comparative theology, it can also be used in courses on dialogical reading of scripture, interreligious relations, and political philosophy.

PART ONE

Overviews

The Power of God and Islam’s Regime of Power on Earth

JONATHAN BROWN

I remember as a teenager watching the movie Warlock (1991) on late-night cable television. Warlock is a terrible movie, but I do recall one thing about the plot. A warlock is trying to piece together some ancient parchments that reveal the “true name of God,” which the warlock can then use to undo all of creation. I remember the climactic scene, in which the warlock learns the name and screams up to the heavens “Yea, I know Thee!” while clouds whirl and thunder claps loudly like someone trying to stop a college friend from telling an embarrassing story over dinner.

This movie is bad, but it’s not unusual. If Hollywood films are any indication, God would seem to have a good number of vulnerabilities, which are routinely poked at by devious fallen angels out to undo His will.¹ In such films, God, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe, is often portrayed much like good King Richard in the Robin Hood tales: out of town and about to be undermined.

And here Hollywood is not entirely innovative. Some (I emphasize some) Talmudic writings speak of God as if He is in need of human aid to achieve His will. One midrash tells of God promising to destroy the children of Israel after the episode of the golden calf but then regretting His vow. Moses tells God that he can help Him out of this predicament by means of a legal ruse. Since a rabbi can grant a petitioner a release from a promise, Moses “wrapped himself in his cloak and seated himself like a Sage, and the holy one, blessed be he, stood before him like one petitioning [for the annulment of] his vow.”² And, of course, in the Hellenic tradition there is Diomedes’s glorying in battle before Troy, raging unchecked until he even spears Ares, the god of war himself, in the bowels and sends him howling back to Olympus.³ David Hume quotes Dione from the poem, “Many ills . . . have the gods inflicted on men; and many ills, in return, have men inflicted on the gods.”⁴

I mention this sampler of classics and trash to make the point that a deity need not be all-powerful, invincible, or invulnerable. We see that—in the ancient and modern heritage of the Abrahamic tradition, which French Orientalists imagined as having sprung from a desert world in which God’s unity and omnipotence were as clear as the enveloping sky over the barren horizon—God is not necessarily in control.⁵ God the Father, God the Creator, can be portrayed as vulnerable to attack, machinations, and manipulation.

But in the Qurʾan, the unmistakable desert horizon comes back into view. The theme of God’s power and its ramifications is, without a doubt, central to the holy book and is salient in the Islamic theological tradition. One wonders if the Qurʾan, which criticizes Jews for allegedly saying, “God’s hands are shackled” (Q. 5:64)⁶ and vehemently rejects the notion that God could suffer as a human being, sees itself in a large part as a corrective. It brings God’s power back into center view (here I am thinking of power as capacity [qadar], especially to exert one’s will, and power as authority [sultan, essentially imperium]). And, historically, it gave birth to a worldview in which power was a main idiom of formatting society and framing relations.

In the Qurʾan, God’s power is the superlative of all superlatives. It is total, absolute, and without exception. “To Him belongs all that is in the heavens and in the earth; surely God, He is the All-sufficient, the All-laudable” (Q. 22:64); “To God belong the hosts of the heavens and the earth; God is All-mighty, All-wise” (Q. 48:7); and “Whosoever desires glory, the glory altogether belongs to God” (Q. 35:10). “He is God; there is no god but He. He is the King, the All-holy, the All-peaceable, the All-faithful, the All-preserver, the All-mighty, the All-compeller, the All-sublime. Glory be to God, above that they associate! He is God, the Creator, the Maker, the Shaper. To Him belong the Names Most Beautiful. All that is in the heavens and the earth magnifies Him; He is the All-mighty, the All-wise” (Q. 59:23–24). Perhaps the most commonly recited verse of the entire Qurʾan is

God: there is no god but He, the Living, the Everlasting. Slumber seizes Him not, neither sleep; to Him belongs all that is in the heavens and the earth. Who is there that shall intercede with Him save by His leave? He knows what lies before them and what is after them, and they comprehend not anything of His knowledge save such as He wills. His Throne comprises the heavens and earth; the preserving of them oppresses Him not; He is the All-high, the All-glorious. (Q. 2:255)⁷

I could go on and on.

I will go on since the Qurʾan seems to do so quite on purpose. God is “never wearied by creation” (Q. 46:33); “He forgives and punishes whomever He wills” (Q. 2:284); everything prostrates to Him, willingly or unwillingly (Q. 13:15; 17:44). In the Qurʾan, the metaphors and parables of God’s power are awesome: oceans of ink and forests of pens could not exhaust His words (Q. 18:109; 31:27); if the Qurʾan were sent down on a mountain, the very rock would be “shattered asunder out of the fear of God” (Q. 59:21). Nothing man can do could hurt God (Q. 3:144, 176–77; 47:32). Even when God lays down what appear to be theological red lines for Himself, His own power and will yield exceptions. No one can intercede with God, for example, “unless He wills it.”

There is no negotiating with God. Abraham’s long pleading and bargaining with God over the fate of Sodom (Gen. 18:16–33) is crushed into two lines in the Qurʾan. Abraham voices his concern over the impending destruction of righteous folk in the town only once. “O Abraham, turn away from this,” the angelic messengers reply curtly. “Truly the command of thy Lord has come, and surely a punishment that cannot be repelled comes upon them” (Q. 11:74). Abraham’s worry for the fate of Lot and other pious folk merits a similarly sharp response in another telling of the episode in the Qurʾan: “We know better who is in [the city]” (Q. 29:32). Even a common act of desperate bargaining that many Muslim scholars allow—namely, the “O God, if you do [insert request here] for me, I promise I’ll [insert promise here]” (in Arabic, this is termed nadhr al-mujāza)—is an illusion. The Prophet informs us, “Indeed a vow, it does not hasten or ward off anything. Rather, vows just prevent one from being stingy.”⁸ No one can actually alter what God has decreed. One cannot buy God’s will with the promise of some act.⁹

In the Hadith tradition, there is a sort of negotiation that occurs over the number of daily prayers. During Muhammad’s miraculous night journey to Jerusalem and ascension through the heavens, it is originally an obligation for fifty daily prayers that is revealed to him. On his way down, however, Muhammad meets Moses, who advises him to go back and ask God for less. Muhammad does so four times, eventually ending up with five daily prayers. But even this negotiation seems more like a stylized performance. In this report, when Moses suggests to the Prophet that he return a final time and ask for even fewer prayers, “it was called out (presumably in some sonorous voice), ‘I have declared what is obligatory and have lightened the burden of My slaves, and I will reward every good deed tenfold.’ ”¹⁰ It is no more real than a negotiation with a boss who has listened in on your every private word.

Of course, one cannot speak of God’s power without some acknowledgment of the problem of theodicy. This question has been debated by Muslim theologians but has not generated the volume of scholarly and popular reflection that has been seen, especially in the last century, within both the Western Christian tradition and Judaism.¹¹ In my travels in the Muslim world, I have never come across an equivalent of When Bad Things Happen to Good People by Rabbi Harold Kushner, a book that has been called “the #1 bestselling inspirational classic from the nationally known spiritual leader; a source of solace and hope for over four-million readers” and has been translated into fifteen languages.¹²

In the late eighth century two schools of thought in the debates over theodicy emerged. The first, upheld by the rationalist Muʿtazila school, affirmed that God was constrained by justice and was unable to do evil (sharr). Everything He did thus had to be for the best (al-aṣlaḥ, Leibniz-like¹³) since He was incapable of doing or commanding evil. Yet this school of thought was and remains a decidedly minority one. It is as if, in Islam, God’s overwhelming power simply swamped anxieties over divine justice. The opposing school, that of the Sunni majority, could be called the Divine Command/Nominalist or even the “Job 38” approach:¹⁴ God is not constrained by justice, God is justice. To even ask about why bad things happen to good people is to miss the point. As the Qurʾan declares, “He is not asked about what He does. They are asked” (Q. 21:23).

Beyond citing the above Qurʾanic verse, the prominent nineteenth-century Muslim theologian Burhan al-Din al-Bajuri (d. 1860) saw it as sufficient to quote a poem by a scholar in the thirteenth century, which he dreamed after hearing of the destruction of Baghdad by the pagan Mongols in 1258:

Leave aside any objection, for the command is not yours,

Nor is ordaining the movements of the planets.

So, do not ask God about what He does,

Whoever wades into the depths of the ocean will perish.¹⁵

Now, it is not that Sunnis did not understand the rationalists’ concerns over issues like theodicy. Rather, they thought that trying to quiet these concerns through speculative argument was misguided. As one Sunni scholar wrote of the rationalists, “They wanted to describe God by His justice, but in so doing they deprived Him of his due virtue (fa-akhrajuhu min faḍlihi )”; the virtue of His power.¹⁶ Sunni theologians over the centuries saw one of their tasks as protecting (ironically) God’s power from heretics. For example, according to Sunni theology, God is not even required to reward good deeds and punish bad, despite His numerous statements in the Qurʾan about doing so.¹⁷ Although the Qurʾan repeats that “God does not break promises” (see Q. 3:9; 13:31; and elsewhere), Sunni theologians have asserted that is it not rationally possible that God could be constrained from doing so if He wanted. It is only God’s choice not to break His promises. Of course, Sunni theologians added that, from our mortal perspective pondering God’s law (sharʿ), it is effectively impossible (mustaḥīl) for Him.¹⁸

This deference to God’s power often required impressive grammatical gymnastics, for example, in the argument that fulfilling the promises and threats God had made is “obligatory for God” but not “obligatory upon Him.” Ultimately, God is all-powerful, and that means our mortal reason must remain apart from Him and unable to reach Him. We must trust, as the Qurʾan declares, that “God does not wrong any of the slaves” (i.e., the slaves of God, in other words, human beings).

The power of God, a power that we ponder as His slaves and as slaves to the medium of created human language, raises the question of how the Qurʾan envisions and possibly formats earthly power. That the Qurʾan refers over and over to human beings as “the slaves” or the “slaves of God” suggests two possibilities.

On the one hand, the absolute and unquestionable power of God and the utter helplessness of His slaves on earth could yield a framework for radical egalitarianism. Just as the French Orientalists imagined, the desert would shape a people of equals; any inkling of claimed inherent superiority between individuals would be dwarfed into nothingness by the immense vault of the sky and the omnipotent God who had raised it up. Indeed, this vision of how power plays out on earth did come about in Islamic history, although in a minority strain among the early Muslims. The Kharijites were radical egalitarians, following closely the Qurʾanic decree that “Indeed the best of you in God’s eyes is the most pious” (Q. 49:13). They held that only t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Participants
• Introduction
• Part One: Overviews
• Part Two: The Theme of “Power” in Muslim and Christian Scriptures
• Part Three: The Theme of “Power and Community” in Islamic and Christian Writings
• Part Four: Political Power and Faith
• Part Five: Reflections
• Subject Index
• Scriptural Citation Index
• About the Editors