Closing the Great Knowledge Divide Jonathan Berry • Study Islam Before Defending It Winter 2004

When insurgents saw the heads off of westerners in the name of their religion and sell DVDs of the executions to co-religionists, that religion deserves serious scrutiny. The Western chattering classes proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace, and much of the American public swallows this claim whole without hesitation. Especially unsettling is the uncritical attitude with which students supposedly devoted to rigorous intellectual exploration frequently accept Islam as innocuous. On evidence that tends towards the flimsy, young academics indict the history of Christianity; using that same evidence, they note that Islam has clashed with Christianity throughout history and thus deserves to be considered a religion of the victimized—enjoying all of the rights and privileges of modern victimhood.

Many conservative Christians, Jews, and secularists – and a few dissenting Muslims – doubt that Islam is a religion of peace. Is the Islamic world as barbaric today and historically as its detractors assert? If that barbarism does in fact exist, how much of it can be attributed to the Islamic religion itself and not to despotic leadership?

To inform a responsible opinion on one of the largest problems facing the world – the conflict between Islam and the West– one must study these questions intently. A few examples from a new book, Alvin J. Schmidt’s The Great Divide: The Failure of Islam and the Triumph of the West, cast some significant doubt on the claim that Islam is a religion of peace. Surveying the ethical contributions of Islam as compared with those of Christianity, Schmidt’s conclusions are grim but compelling. The responsible student of the War on Terror should certainly pick up this book.

Particularly provocative truths come to light in Schmidt’s comparison of the life of Jesus with the life of Muhammad. For instance, compare their views of marriage. Jesus was celibate, but he preached permanent monogamy between man and woman and taught against the custom of polygyny common in his time. Instead of breaking with the polygynous tradition of the Old Testament, however, Muhammad took on several wives. Most horrifyingly, according to Schmidt, he took on his third wife, Aisha, when she was only six, consummating the marriage with her when she was nine.

Schmidt also compares how Jesus and Muhammad dealt with adulterous women. Jesus told the adulteress’s would-be executioners: “Let him who is without sin among you be the first to throw a stone at her,” (John 8:7), both condemning the woman’s sin and preaching mercy for her regardless. When a woman comes to Muhammad to confess that she is a prostitute, Schmidt writes, Muhammad participated in her execution by throwing the first stone.

Westerners who treat Muslims as victims often neglect Islamic culture’s unconscionable treatment of women. At the same time, Christianity’s affirmation of the moral equality of women and men goes ignored. Schmidt surveys the poor treatment given to women by pre-Christian Roman, Greek, Hebrew and Assyrian cultures, comparing it with the charity and compassion that Jesus showed them. He points out that today, when society affirms gender equality to the point of asserting that men and women are identical, we lack the historical perspective to realize that Jesus’ treatment of women was truly revolutionary. It was Christianity, for example, that led the Roman Emperor Valentinian I to end the custom of manus, in which married men wielded absolute power over their wives. Contrast this with Muhammad’s rather pedophilic marriage practices.

In a great deal of campus discourse, especially when it comes to evaluating the actions of the Bush administration, students rarely take the time to consider the histories of the cultures they are defending or criticizing. The only way to find a sane middle ground between “No Blood for Oil” and “Kill ‘Em All and Let God Sort ‘Em Out,” however, is for both sides to know the history of Islamic culture as well as the history of the West.

Jonathan Berry is a senior in Ezra Siles College and Managing Editor of The Yale Free Press.