Michael Knowles: the Politics of the Trinity 4

The Politics of the Trinity Michael Knowles

God as Understood in Islam.

The Islamic notion of God is not the Christian God. Mohammad explicitly repudiates the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in Surahs 4.172 and 5.73, which in the context of the Arabic tribal religious polytheism which he was very concerned to eradicate, is understandable. “”God is but one God. God forbid that he should have a son” (ibid). For that reason he always speaks of Jesus very deliberately as “the son of Mary” (ibid et passim) and never as the Son (or son) of God. At first his repudiation of the notion of the Trinity may seem unexceptionable, after all the Jews were of the same mind. However, in the light of what the doctrine of the Trinity actually implies politically and socially and what Mohammad’s, and Islam’s, religious and political perspectives were and are, his repudiation of a Triune God is very significant.

For Mohammad what matters most about God is his uniqueness. “God is but one God”. His emphasis on the oneness of God is primary. The only god is Allah and the only power is Allah’s. Allah is “Lord of the Universe….Sovereign of the Day of Judgement. You alone we worship”(1). That is the central Koranic perspective on God.

To be understood rightly the Koran has to be read from Mohammad’s twofold position and perspective as a religious figure and a political figure, in many respects a warlord. It is his document. He has to be understood for it to be understood. He was an intensely religious person with, in the context of the polytheism of contemporary Arab tribal society, the revolutionary message that there is one God; and with that message the claim that he, and he alone, was God’s messenger. This claim challenged the local tribal establishment to its roots. They drove him out of Mecca to Medina. Power mattered. Mohammad learned that lesson to his cost in Mecca and he put it right in Medina. He became all-powerful in Medina, at the expense of others, particularly the Jews of that city who were exiled or sold into slavery or killed, and he returned to Mecca in due course in triumph. He was a political ruler and local war lord. When he asserted the oneness of God and God’s power, he asserted his own power. “Obey God and the Apostle” (3.32) is what the Koran is about.

The essence of the god of the Koran/Mohammad is unicity and power. The relationship of Mohammad’s god to mankind is a relationship of power. There is only one god and all power is his. “God is the Most High, the Supreme One” (31.30); “He is the Mighty One” (32.6); “Mighty is God” (31.27 et passim). Almighty Power is God’s first attribute. and that theology is at the heart of Mohammad’s perspective on all relationships of God to his creatures, of the prophet to his believers, of the ruler to the ruled; of the caliph and emir to the people; of male to female; of husband to wife. The core Christian belief that ‘God is love and he who abides in love abides in God’ is not one that finds a resonance in the Koran (and I am specifically referring to the Koran, not to later Islamic developments like Sufism which was influenced in its origins by Christianity). It is of significance that in the index to Damoud’s translation ‘love’ does not occur. I have not myself come across the word or the concept in the Koran either. Neither does it fit its whole tone and direction. There is a message of mutuality or reciprocation between God and man in the Koran but it is not a mystical one. It is not the mutuality and the communion of love. It is relationship of power in which the obedient and the believer are rewarded and the disobedient and the non-believer are punished. It is the relationship of the Almighty to ‘clots of blood’ (96.1). The god of the Koran is one who is to be obeyed and worshipped.

It is therefore illogical and theologically wayward to try to separate the religion of Islam from its politics. The politics of Islam are not just the application of the minutiae of the regulations contained in the Koran of Islam to civil and social behaviour. First and foremost they are a particular perspective, namely that the only form of rule to be followed is that of the model of the relationship of the one God to mankind, namely a relationship of power. The autocracy of Allah is the template of Islamic political life.

It should not be thought that the absence of a belief in God as Triune puts Judaism on a par with the religion of the Koran in this matter. Nothing could be further from the truth. Any statement of religious faith that contains the intimate personal mystical knowing of God as in the Prophets, the Psalms and the Song of Songs is essentially different. The Koran is just not comparable. However, for something similar in their way to these writings in intimacy and insight into God one must look, not just to the New Testament, but also to Hinduism. It can only be hoped that Hinduism in Britain, low-profile and quietist though it tends to be, will to everybody’s immense spiritual benefit find the confidence one day to develop and express itself to the full.