Modern voices, from al-Kairanawī to Shabbir Akhtar

The modern Muslim critique of Paul began in British India, in open debate with the missionaries. At Agra in 1854 the scholar Raḥmatullāh al-Kairanawī faced the German missionary Karl Gottlieb Pfander, and he pressed the same case in Arabic from 1867 onward.¹

Al-Kairanawī fought the missionaries with their own scholars. He drew on every European source he could find, among them the critics’ remarks on “the apostle Paul’s devastating influence on early Christianity”.²

His method passed to the reformers of Cairo. Rashīd Riḍā drew on al-Kairanawī at length, quoting some sixty pages of his work in the Qurʾān commentary he produced with Muḥammad ʿAbduh.³

In the part drawn from al-Kairanawī’s treatise, the verdict on Paul is blunt. He is counted among “the hypocrites and liars, the teachers of falsehood and the deceiving apostles”, and named as “the one who ruined the Christian religion, and made every forbidden thing lawful for those who believed him”.⁴

Riḍā set down the same judgement in his own words. Paul, he wrote, was “the first to lay down this Christian creed now known”, a Jew who had been “the fiercest of the enemies of the Messiah”, and who “saw that he could not harm them and corrupt their affair except by entering among them”.⁵ Paul’s teachings prevailed because they “were closer to the pagan beliefs of the Romans”, who held the first authority in the church “and gave it this form”.⁶

Riḍā took Paul’s own letters as evidence that the corruption of the Injīl “began in the first century”. Paul marvelled that the Galatians were so soon removed “unto another gospel”, because some “would pervert the gospel of Christ”.⁷ Paul himself called such men “false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ”.⁸

He read Paul’s quarrel with Barnabas in the same light. The two parted, Riḍā held, only because they differed “on the reality of the teaching of the Messiah”, and had Barnabas not presented Paul to the apostles, “they would not have trusted his claim of repentance and faith in the Messiah”.⁹

Answering a Christian dictionary’s proof texts for the Trinity, he put the charge in a single sentence.

نَعْتَقِدُ أَنَّ بُولُسَ هُوَ وَاضِعُ أَسَاسِ الدِّيَانَةِ النَّصْرَانِيَّةِ الْحَاضِرَةِ، وَجَاءَ فِيهَا بِمَا لَمْ يُؤْثَرْ عَنِ الْمَسِيحِ عَلَيْهِ السَّلَامُ، وَلَا عَنْ تَلَامِيذِهِ الْحَوَارِيِّينَ

“We believe that Paul laid the foundation of the present Christian religion, and brought into it what was handed down neither from the Messiah, peace be upon him, nor from his disciples.”¹⁰

In India, Muhammad Ali Jauhar carried the verdict into the twentieth century. His message to his fellow Muslims was that Paul had made Christianity into a theology of the cross, and had corrupted the original teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam.¹¹

By the later twentieth century the verdict was common ground. Surveying Persian Muslim writing on Christianity, Isabel Stümpel-Hatami found that for most of its authors Paul is “the second founder of Christianity or the inventor of Christianity in its present-day form”.¹²

Reza Aslan

One important modern figure on this question is Reza Aslan, the Iranian-born Muslim writer and professor of religious studies in the United States. He stresses that Paul created a theological system Jesus himself would not have recognized, so radical and so far outside the norms of Jewish thought that it could not have been accepted except by claiming it came directly from Jesus:

What Paul offers in his letters is not, as some of his contemporary defenders maintain, merely an alternative take on Jewish spirituality. Paul, instead, advances an altogether new doctrine that would have been utterly unrecognizable to the person upon whom he claims it is based. For it was Paul who solved the disciples’ dilemma of reconciling Jesus’s shameful death on the cross with the messianic expectations of the Jews, by simply discarding those expectations and transforming Jesus into a completely new creature, one that seems almost wholly of his own making: Christ.¹³

The view agrees with the critical arguments in Islam, and it confirms that the transformation of the teaching of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam into a Trinitarian religion of salvation was the invention of an individual in conflict with true revelation.

Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas

The deviation is also criticized firmly by Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, who rejects the notion that the tawḥīd of ʿĪsā ibn Maryam was diverted by ʿĪsā ibn Maryam himself. The deviation began with particular figures after him, above all Paul. He writes:

It was some other disciples and the apostles including chiefly Paul who departed from the original revelation and true teachings based on it, and who began preaching a new religion and set about establishing the foundations for a new religion which later came to be called Christianity.¹⁴

Isma’il R. al Faruqi

That view agrees with the sharp assessment of the late Isma’il R. al Faruqi, the Muslim analyst par excellence of Christian dogma, who showed how post-Pauline theology eroded the purity of the concept of God and replaced it with the influence of myth and the mystery religions. Al Faruqi asserts:

Evidently, Christian thought has not yet outgrown its linkage to the mystery religions. What it digested of Judaism is a historical figurization, a context, as historians of religions would say. What it digested of Hellenism is a cosmetic superstructure which gives it pomp and circumstance. In its rock-bottom essence, the core of its religious content, it remains true to the mystery religions with their immanent god dispensing his man of holiness and salvation through the catharsis which participation in the sacrament brings. Here, transcendence is a decorative notion, inexpressed and inexpressible except when it assumes the modality of the concrete.¹⁵

Of Paul himself, al Faruqi states:

What Jesus did not furnish, Paul was ready to offer to Christianity. For, according to Paul, Jesus Christ is God, incarnate, crucified, and resurrected that man may be saved from the predicament of sin. But if there is to be any redemption at all, there must be something from which it may take place. This “something” he contributed to Christian dogma.¹⁶

Al Faruqi traced the doctrine to its source. “As far as the synoptic gospels can prove,” he wrote, “Jesus never entertained the peccatist thesis”, the doctrine that man is born in sin.¹⁷ Paul supplied it, and gave the law a purpose to match.

Of the verse “The Law entered that the offence might abound”, al Faruqi judged that it “clearly suggests the working of his blasphemously constructive mind. God sent the Law that it may be violated, that all men may sin”.¹⁸

The whole doctrine, he concluded, magnified sin until man became “the utterly powerless creature that Christianist salvation theory requires him to be”, and that was “sheer construction, designed to serve dogma”.¹⁹ In a later work he named the result. A new religiosity had “transformed the religion of Jesus into Christianism, the religion of Paul, Athanasius, Tertullian, Augustine, of the imperial Roman Church”.²⁰

Shabbir Akhtar

As Shabbir Akhtar, a contemporary Muslim philosopher, puts it:

Granted that Paul was the last of the apostles of Christ, an apostle with honour in his native land, he was also a prophet manqué, the lost prophet who missed the mark, so to speak. But he was not simply a man of unfulfilled potential or misdirected energy. Where there are pretenders, there are even more pretences. But Paul was no false pretender. If he did pretend, he pretended, in the noblest sense, to the greatest things of the spirit. He broods in his theology as he attempts to make sense of his confused and unsettling experience of Jesus. Was he self-deceived? To outsiders, it must appear so. The comparison then is not to be with Jesus, a true prophet. Nor is the real analogy here with Muhammad – as if he were also in the wrong profession! Rather, it is with literary figures such as Charles Dickens who was not a novelist at heart but rather a novelist in the dramatic tradition of the master Shakespeare – but without knowing this truth. Like Milton, many men do not know which party they belong to until after they have reached the further side of experience. If Muhammad was the last prophet, Paul was the lost prophet. That is the most charitable Islamic verdict on the man Muslims see as the founder of Christianity.²¹

The criticism of these Muslim scholars confirms that the doctrine of divinity in Christianity, as inherited through Paul, is the product of theological manipulation with roots in a paganism opposed to the principle of tawḥīd.

Can anyone of sound mind fail to see it? Only the jeweler knows the gem.

1. Christine Schirrmacher, “The Influence of Higher Bible Criticism on Muslim Apologetics in the Nineteenth Century,” in Jacques Waardenburg (ed.), Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 274. Al-Kairanawī’s Arabic work is Iẓhār al-Ḥaqq. ↩
2. Ibid., p. 275. ↩
3. Ibid., p. 273. The commentary is Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Ḥakīm, known as Tafsīr al-Manār. ↩
4. Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā, Tafsīr al-Qurʾān al-Ḥakīm (Tafsīr al-Manār) (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma lil-Kitāb, 1990), vol. 9, p. 215. The passage refers to “the fourth matter” and “the eighteenth prophecy”, headings of al-Kairanawī’s treatise, in the section on the prophecies of the Prophet that Riḍā took from it. ↩
5. Ibid., vol. 6, p. 45. ↩
6. Ibid., vol. 6, pp. 240–241. ↩
7. Ibid.; Galatians 1:6–7 (KJV). ↩
8. 2 Corinthians 11:13 (KJV), which Riḍā cites as 11:15–16, following the verse numbers of the Arabic Bible. ↩
9. Riḍā, op. cit., vol. 6, pp. 240–241. ↩
10. Ibid., vol. 10, p. 293, on Sūrah al-Tawbah 9:30, answering the article on God in George Post’s dictionary of the Bible. ↩
11. Sheila McDonough, “The Muslims of South Asia (1857–1947),” in Jacques Waardenburg (ed.), Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 255. ↩
12. Isabel Stümpel-Hatami, “Christianity as Described by Persian Muslims,” in Jacques Waardenburg (ed.), Muslim Perceptions of Other Religions: A Historical Survey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 234. ↩
13. Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth (New York: Random House, 2013), p. 118. ↩
14. Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, Islam and Secularism (Kuala Lumpur: International Institute of Islamic Thought and Civilization, 1993), p. 28. ↩
15. Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Divine Transcendence and Its Expression (Kuala Lumpur: ABIM, 1983), p. 21. ↩
16. Isma’il R. al Faruqi, Christian Ethics: A Historical and Systematic Analysis of Its Dominant Ideas (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1967), p. 203; see also Mohd Elfie Nieshaem Juferi, “Isma’il al Faruqi’s Appraisal of Paul of Tarsus,” https://bit.ly/3ZtSSAu. ↩
17. Al Faruqi, Christian Ethics, op. cit., p. 203. ↩
18. Ibid., p. 204; Romans 5:20. ↩
19. Ibid., pp. 205–206. ↩
20. Isma’il Raji al Faruqi, Al Tawhid: Its Implications for Thought and Life, 2nd ed. (Herndon, Virginia: International Institute of Islamic Thought, 1992), p. 159. ↩
21. Shabbir Akhtar, The New Testament in Muslim Eyes: Paul’s Letter to the Galatians (London: Routledge, 2018), p. 269. ↩