Hugh Nibley, “Islam and Mormonism—A Comparison,” Ensign, Mar. 1972, 55
The late great Classical scholar Werner Jaeger once said that the only time the
lectures of the immortal Eduard Meyer were really interesting and the only time he
was ever able to fill his lecture hall at the University of Berlin was when he
talked about the Mormons.
Eduard Meyer was the last mortal to attempt single-handed a history of the
Ancient World; others before him had written monumental histories of antiquity,
“but never before had such work been undertaken by anyone with a comparable
preparation.” 1 “He had a special preference for the
history of religion which never left him, from his dissertation (at the age of
twenty) to the great work of his old age,” 2 and that is why in
1904 he spent a year in Utah; he was convinced that “Mormonism … is not
just another of countless sects, but a new revealed religion. … What in the
study of other revealed religions can only be surmised after painful research
is here directly accessible in reliable witnesses. Hence the origin and
history of Mormonism possesses great and unusual value for
the student of religious history.” 3
In particular, “Mormonism,” he writes, “excited my interest
at an early age before all else because of the surprising analogy, extending
even to the smallest details, between it and the fundamental
drives, external forms, and historical development of Islam:
here one might hope to discover significant clues for a proper understanding of
Mohammed and his religion. … there is hardly another historical parallel as
instructive as this one. … It is impossible to undertake the scholarly
investigation of the one without a closer acquaintance with the other.” 4
It would be foolish not to take advantage of the spade-work already done by
so competent a researcher as Meyer. Let us consider then the points on which he
believes the Moslems and Mormons to be most alike and on which they
differ. At the outset, the resemblances pointed out by Meyer are quite
superficial, while the differences are profound and fundamental.
First as to the likenesses: Islam owed its impact on the world and
its great appeal to its followers to the electrifying announcement that God had
again spoken from the heavens and that after 600 years of silence the voice
of a prophet was again heard in the land. It was this announcement that aroused
the scorn and derision of the world and brought down
storms of denunciation and persecution on the head of that prophet.
Here indeed is a closer parallel to the case of Joseph Smith; in fact, early
Mormon leaders saw no reason why Mohammed should not be considered a true
prophet, for there have been many prophets, great and small, in the
past whose words are not in the Bible.
But the striking resemblance turns almost at once into an equally striking
contrast when the Moslems announce that Mohammed is the last of the
prophets and that there can be no prophet after him. “When a doctrine is
sealed,” writes an eminent Moslem scholar, “it is complete, and there can be no
further addition. The holy Prophet Mohammed closed the long line of Apostles. …
there has been and will be no prophet after Mohammed.” 5 Thus Islam ignored its one
unique advantage over conventional Judaism and Christianity, the
joyful tidings that God still speaks from the heavens through his prophets.
Upon learning about the Mormons, Moslems usually comment favorably on the
resemblance between the Word of Wisdom and Moslem rules of
abstinence; but again the parallel is weakened by the fact that only a small
minority of Moslems, such as the strict and rigorous Wahabis,
observe such rules. The toleration of more than one wife in both religions is
based on quite different principles and at any rate has been of limited
application in both societies. Both religions advocate high moral principles,
but then so do most other religions.
Most fundamental are certain doctrinal traditions that, while found in the
Koran, have been rejected by conventional Christianity and Judaism but have
always been a part of Mormonism. Great emphasis is placed, for
example, on the concept of dispensations, i.e., the restoration of prophetic
gifts and divine authority after long periods of apostasy and
darkness through the sending of a great prophet. This doctrine was necessary to
justify Mohammed’s appearance as a new prophet but became a dead letter in Islam
after his death.
The Koran tells how at a great council held in the heavens at the creation
of the earth God set forth the plan of salvation, and how Satan
rejected the plan, refused to bow to Adam, and was cast out of
heaven by main force, falling to this earth, where he now undertakes to tempt
the children of men during their time of probation here below. 6 Such teachings enjoy great prominence in
the newly discovered documents of the early Christian and Jewish saints and
sectaries of the desert, documents of which Eduard Meyer knew nothing but which
now go a long way toward explaining how the teachings got into the Koran.
Actually, these things belong to the mysteries of the Koran and have never meant
much to Moslems. Meyer himself limits the resemblances between Mormonism and
Islam
to “fundamental drives, external forms, and historical development,”
all of which are secondary to the real genius of a religion—what its followers
really believe. As mentioned before, in Meyer’s work it is the differences
between Islam and Mormonism that are
most significant.
In the first place, Meyer, who feels quite at home with the great Moslem
leaders, is puzzled and annoyed by the Mormons; he finds it
“easier to reach a confident conclusion about Mohammed, Abu Bekr, Omar, than
about Joseph Smith or Brigham Young, in spite of the relatively much greater
amount of material surviving concerning the latter.” 7 He can explain Mohammed as a human being,
plagued with doubts and misgivings about the nature of his
calling and the authenticity of his visions.
“For Joseph Smith, on the other hand,” he reports, “it is a most distinctive
characteristic that any such sort of doubt or misgiving is utterly out of the
question.” 8 The biblical prophets annoy Meyer in the
same way; since for him there is no such thing as revelation, he insists that
“Jesus never claimed direct revelation … never had a vision … never once
predicted future events.” The passages in the Bible that describe the Lord as
doing such things Meyer simply attributes to later invention.
“It goes without saying,” Meyer decides, “that the Gospel of John is utterly
worthless as a source,” 9 and as for
literal-minded prophets like Ezekiel, he simply loathes them. But the thing to
notice is that Meyer puts the Mormon prophets in the same category with the
deluded prophets of the Bible and in a very different category from
Mohammed.
The intractable Joseph Smith “thinks of spiritual things in a far cruder and
more materialistic way than Mohammed … all of his manifestations, visions,
healings, ecstasies, etc., are quite everyday things to him and his followers. …
For Mohammed on the other hand, the only miracle [the ‘sign’] is the revelation
of the words of the divine book. … he forcefully denied possessing any of the
other miraculous powers possessed by the ancient prophets …” 10 The italics emphasize that Joseph Smith
is again classified with the prophets of
While Joseph Smith taught “the continuation of direct prophetic inspiration,
along with charismatic gifts of tongues, healings, etc.,” to be generally
enjoyed whenever the true church is upon the earth, “the idea of any miraculous
powers in the possession of his followers is utterly out of the question” for
Mohammed. 12 Again Joseph Smith is among the
prophets: “He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and
greater works … shall he do. …” (John
14:12.)
“Mohammed was able to win the loyalty of men of such superior intelligence and
high social standing as Abu Bekr and Omar … while Joseph Smith’s followers
belonged almost without exception to the dregs of the people. …” Here one is
reminded that in the early Jewish and Christian writings the followers of
the prophets are regularly designated as “the poor,” because they really were
the poor and outcast. But Mohammed was able “to command unswerving
submission” of these followers, whereas “the first to follow [Joseph Smith]
later fell away and were expelled from the Church.” 13
Among those who maintained family and party loyalty to
Mohammed were many who did not take him seriously as a prophet, and
many soon found it to their temporal advantage to support him regardless of
their beliefs. But Joseph Smith never had anything to offer his followers but
the sure word of prophecy, and Meyer notes with wonder that there were
those whom he “threw out of the Church” who never denied his prophetic calling.
It was, of course, the Book of Mormon that first suggested the parallel
between its author and Mohammed, each of whom claimed to have
given the world a divine book brought to him personally by an angel. But there
all resemblance ends; the differences between the two books are as great as
those between their authors. The Book of Mormon, though transmitted and
translated by divine ministration, was an earthly book, written by the hands of
men, as is all scripture, and hence apt to contain the mistakes of men.
The Koran, on the other hand, is held by most Moslems to be “identical with the
uncreated eternal Word of God that is written on the heavenly tablets;
literally, not in any figurative sense. …” Even the ink, paper, and
binding are accepted in the most literal sense as the Uncreated Word of God. 14
The Book of Mormon is a history of the doings of very fallible humans, while
devotees of the Koran disdain to attribute to it anything as banal as human
history. While Joseph Smith “copies out the peculiar written characters of the
holy book,” Meyer notes, “such a thing would never have occurred to Mohammed.” 24 And whereas Joseph
Smith “claims that he actually dug it up and kept it in his
house … for Mohammed it always remains in the hands of the angel.” 15
There is nothing like the testimony of the Three Witnesses to support
Mohammed’s story, the Koran repeatedly and solemnly
affirming that it is its own witness, and though Meyer
naturally rejects the testimony of the witnesses out of hand, still it jars him.
“The essential thing is, that this vision was for the Three Witnesses an
absolutely real occurrence, on the complete and literal actuality
of which none of them ever betrayed the slightest trace of a doubt. The
opponents of the Mormons made every conceivable effort to get these men to
retract their testimonies and to admit that there was a deception; but
they remained unshaken, and continued to the end of their lives to
affirm the truth of the revelation and the authenticity of the Book of
Mormon. Far harder to explain is the testimony of the eight witnesses.” 16
Since he will accept neither book as inspired, Meyer prefers the Koran to
the Book of Mormon, because it took years of painful study to produce and
it shows “a conviction won through genuinely strenuous mental effort, and
even at times a poetic exaltation.” 17
Naturally one prefers the work of a thinker and a poet to a big
history turned out all at once by a very young man who is both ignorant and
strangely devoid of misgivings: “… the vocabulary is exceedingly limited,
except for the numerous peculiar words and proper names
invented by the author, in which he gives his imagination free rein.” 18
Mohammed, with his purely spiritual book, never takes the terrible risks
that Joseph Smith does, though the Koran constantly flings out meaningless
challenges. Meyer fails to appreciate that the Book of Mormon is a highly
testable document, since for him there is nothing to test: there is no
revelation, so there is no point to challenging any document, including the
Bible, that claims it. While both the Koran and the Book of
Mormon claim to be strictly in the biblical tradition, Mohammed, as Meyer
observes, “has but a dim conception” of the Bible, and even the greatest
Moslem scholars are astonishingly ignorant of the scriptures; in no way has the
Book of Mormon supplanted the Bible as has the Koran.
The key to understanding both the likenesses and differences
between Mormonism and Islam is to be found
in the double nature of the latter, which draws from both “vertical” and
“horizontal” traditions. Vertical Judaism and Christianity is
that brand of religion that believed in the necessity of direct revelation,
inspired leaders, charismatic gifts, the coming of a real Messiah and
a real millennium; the predominance of such beliefs at an early time has become
apparent from the oldest Jewish and Christian manuscripts, whose recent
discovery has completely changed the picture of Christian beginnings.
Both Judaism and Christianity, it would now appear, began as charismatic
vertical religions that were in time completely suppressed and supplanted by the
horizontal or academic way of thinking, which holds that one should reverence
only the tradition handed down horizontally from one generation of teachers and
scholars to the next and that the complete religious life is
comprised in the proper observance of established customs and the acceptance of
officially approved doctrines. However, Islam arose in a time
and
place in which much of the old vertical attitudes of the desert sectaries still
survived, but in which also the influence of the schoolmen was well established
and
on the increase. Hence the two elements mingle and impart a spirit
of ambiguity and controversy to every Moslem discussion.
Since Islam’s debt to the early desert sectaries (such as those
represented by the Dead Sea scrolls) has not yet been seriously studied, a few
illustrations may be helpful. One evening in March of the year A.D. 620 Mohammed
took a walk to the valley of Mina on the western outskirts of his hometown of
Mecca, where some pilgrims were camping. Some of the campers were Jews—Chasraj
from Yathrib in the north—who had separated themselves from the rest of their
people, after the immemorial custom of the desert sectaries. They were looking for
a prophet, and they accepted Mohammed as their inspired leader; the next year
they returned and secretly entered a covenant to support him. Thus the Prophet’s
first solid support came from the vertically minded sectaries of the desert.
At the same time he had his famous dream of journeying to heaven from the
temple at Jerusalem and there meeting Moses, Christ, Abraham,
John the Baptist, Enoch, and Aaron, and seeing Adam
presiding as judge over the great assembly of all his children. These are the
figures that dominate in the early apocryphal writings of the Jews and
Christians—no wonder Mohammed’s Arabic relatives shook their heads in
perplexity and doubt. And when Mohammed himself had serious doubts
about the divinity of his calling, it was one of the sectaries who had read
both the Old Testament and the New, his wife’s uncle Maraka, who
told him that his visions were genuine and that he would be
the special prophet to his people.
But the early Christian and Jewish traditions that survive in the
Koran and in works by its early commentators came to the Arabs
secondhand and were never really assimilated or understood by them. “No
knowledge have I of the chiefs on high, discussing among themselves,” says
Mohammed; “only this has been revealed to me: to give warning plainly and
publicly.” 19 That is, Mohammed has heard about the
council in heaven, but he really knows nothing about it. So we are told of
God’s plan, laid down at the foundation of the earth; and yet the plan is
no plan at all, for punishment and reward have nothing whatever to do
with individual behavior and all things happen—”don’t ask why or how”
(bila kaif)—according to the imponderable will and pleasure of God.
Like the early Christians and Jews, the Koran is aware of the great
importance of the rites and ordinances of the temple, yet the cult of
Jerusalem was supplanted almost immediately by the more familiar and
very ancient cult of Mecca. “Though Mohammed was in fact a charismatic leader,”
after the manner of the early sectaries, according to a recent study, “… the
concept of the charismatic leader had little part in the Qur’anic system of
ideas.” 20
Though the Koran recalls the marvelous works of God for and among the Chosen
People, “Mohammed did not claim to be a saint, and deliberately
renounced the doing of miracles.” 21 He was not in the line of the great
prophets, the restorers, all of whom spoke with the Lord face to face and
whose ministries were marked by signs and wonders; he was,
as Waraka said, “The prophet for this people (an-nabi
li-hadhihi-l-’ummah).” He was a reformer and a great one, but
he was not a restorer; of the things the Bible talks about he had, as Meyer
observes, little or no understanding.
But if Islam came early enough to catch the last echoes of early
Christianity and vertical Judaism, it also came late enough to find the
schoolmen in complete control of the situation. The official theology of the
church and the synagogue was that which the churchmen and the rabbis had
learned from the University of Alexandria, and the Moslems lost
no time falling in line, quickly producing a host of learned theologians whose
mental and verbal gymnastics could put the Christian and the Jewish
doctors to shame.
Their interpretations, imposed upon the more “primitive” teaching of the Koran,
make every point of doctrine in Islam a disputed one. The mollahs
(Muslims trained in law and doctrine) insist that Islam is the ultimate
world religion and criticize other religions as being geographically limited and
culturally conditioned; yet the ordinary Moslem boasts that no one can
understand the Koran except a born Arab.
While the official theology constantly reiterates that Mohammed is the last
of the prophets (a point not pressed in the Koran itself), a large part of the
Moslem world looks forward to the coming of other prophets, notably the Mahdi, and
has ever been eager to follow leaders claiming divine inspiration. Trying to
reconcile the two views, A. Y. Ali writes, “God’s teaching is and will always be
continuous, but there has been and will be no prophet after Mohammed.” 22
If God can teach continuously without a prophet, why Mohammed? If God’s
entire message could be put in a small book 1200 years ago, why not 2400 or
3600 years ago? If men have needed prophets in the past, as the Koran itself
pointedly asks, why not today? Though it was its vivid eschatology that gave Islam
its great initial appeal (as it did Christianity and Judaism), Islam,
like its sister religions, has become particularly weak in the field of
eschatology: Mohammed now turns out to be a prophet who does not prophesy.
Constantly repeating the old formula of the sectaries, that God is gentle and
forbearing, the Moslems early adopted a policy of conquest by force and
have ever been imbued with the polemical and party spirit that
has kept the doctors of all religions divided and squabbling
through the centuries.
The same ambivalence is apparent in the attitude to the Koran. Hailed as
“the book that makes things clear,” in a world in which the rabbis and
the doctors of the church could never agree among themselves about their own
scriptures, the Koran soon turned out to be an object of even greater
disagreement than the Bible, while many Moslems point to its supreme obscurity
as a sign of its divinity. There are as many conflicting commentaries on the
Koran as there are on the Bible, and as many conflicting sects claiming
its true interpretation: one of the most famous hadiths or sayings
attributed to Mohammed is that “there are seventy-seven sects in Islam
(already in his day) and all but one are for the burning!”
It is claimed that the Koran eschews the arts of rhetoric for the plain,
simple language that can be grasped by one and all, yet in the
teaching of the Koran the principal emphasis has always been on i’rab, correct
pronunciation, with the insistence that it is more important to pronounce the
words with the correct enunciation and the proper tone of voice than it is
to understand what they mean.
The Koran claims to be the complete and final word of
God, yet the doctors of Islam have handed down tens of thousands of hadiths,
that is, things that Mohammed is reported to have said or would have said
(according to them) to clarify and extend the teaching. The Koran
declares that no amount of intellectual effort will avail in understanding the
word of God, yet it was the Moslem teachers who first turned wholeheartedly to
Aristotle to find an answer to theological questions, and it was from them
that the scholastic philosophers of the medieval church later took over.
The central theme of Moslem as of Christian theology is the nature of God, and
while the Moslem doctors boast of being free of the contradictions and
obscurities that have ever marked the course of trinitarian theology, their
wholehearted acceptance (along with the Christians and the Jews) of the
God of the Alexandrian school-men—absolutely, exclusively, totally,
inconceivably one—soon got them into even worse predicaments than the
Christian theologians.
Thus the Moslem doctors have often noted that a God who is totally
incomprehensible leads straight to atheism and idolatry (as
among the Sabaeans); yet incomprehensible he must be if he is to be absolutely
unique, unapproachable, indescribable, totally unlike any other thing—and
he must be all those things if he is to be the Only One: there can be nothing
like him.
Even to imagine God as having any “partners” of any kind sharing his nature and
his activities is the great crime of shirk; he does all things himself
without the need or wish for any helpers—yet the Moslem creed requires belief
in God, his angels, his prophets, his apostles, his books, i.e., with a whole
host of agents through whom the all-sufficient God somehow operates in his
dealings with men. And while it is wicked to think of man as
having anything whatever in common with God, still man is supposed to love him,
yearn to be with him, seek the reward of gazing upon his face, and
in the end become completely identified with him, one with whom he can have
nothing in common!
It is outrageous blasphemy to think of a Son as participating in his
glory and power; how much worse, then, to conceive of other and
lesser beings existing beside him—man’s very existence is a crime: yet the
Moslem theologians admit that man exists, along with a lot of other not so
glorious things. For though God alone created all things, and though he is
perfectly good and does only what he wants to do, the doctors insist that evil is
a reality and that the world is full of it. The problem of evil goes thus
unanswered.
The idea that God might have children is utterly abhorrent to the Moslems:
we are not his children but things that he has created out of nothing; but he
created us with tragic weaknesses in our nature: this anomaly leads to the
fatalism and cynicism of an Omar Khayyam.
The Koran hails Jesus as a true prophet and a great one, yet
Moslem theology rejects all his teachings about the Son of God as false; it
teaches that Mary was “the woman of truth” who conceived Jesus by the Holy
Ghost and bore him when she was still a virgin, yet it deplores the idea
that God should have a Son.
A well-known teaching in Islam is that “we come out from God and
to him we shall return.” This has led to much controversy among Moslem
theologians. How can we go from and return to him if he is everywhere?
In nothing is the dual tradition of Islam more apparent
than in the division of its great teachers into two main schools, one of which
insists on a completely formless and incomprehensible God while the
other teaches of a God who has a body just like a man’s. The former asks: “Can
God have any attributes whatever without completely destroying belief in his
invisible, unchanging Oneness?” 23 Yet a famous teacher of the other
school, Abu Amir, “would slap on his own thigh and say [commenting
on Sura 68: 42], ‘God has a real thigh, just like this one here!’ ” 23
The Koran can define God in terms of the schools and then go right on
talking about him as a real person. It can tell us that men are lost or saved
by his good pleasure alone and through no act of theirs and
then insist that all men are individually responsible in all things. It swears
by the Bible, which it never reads, and knows nothing of
the Messiah. The Moslems insist that nothing whatever can be known about God and
then fill libraries with treatises on his true nature. It is outrageous
presumption for anything to exist beside him, they say—yet here we are.
He created absolutely everything that is out of his own perfect nature, and
yet the world is full of evil.
Ability to live with such basic contradictions would seem to be a highly
developed trait among the Arabs. “The Oriental is not a realist,” writes a
famous Moslem scholar; “he is above all an idealist. He certainly hears and
contemplates nature … but what he grasps is very soon altered, or rather
stylized”; then he quotes P. Ricard: “Muslim art … turns away from the reality
of existing things. It appears to reject all that binds it closely or remotely
to the living world. It only permits the representation of inner, imaginary vues.
…” 24
The Arab sees what he wants to or as he wants it to be. The same type of
licensed thinking is the hallmark of conventional Christian theology, and
it was because Mormonism turned away from this theology of freewheeling symbol and
fantasy that it was anathema to all the churches. For all its superficial
resemblances to Islam, Mormonism is even farther removed from it
than from sectarian Christianity.
Note: Additional footnote explanations and supportive
material are available upon request from the Ensign, 79 South State
Street, Salt Lake City, Utah 84111.
Gospel topic: religion
[illustrations]
Illustrated by Merrill Gogan
© 2003 Intellectual Reserve, Inc. All
rights reserved.