Polemics as Caricature: The False Portrayal of Prophet Muhammad ﷺ by John of Damascus and Thomas Aquinas
This essay examines a historic Christian polemical tradition espoused by two high-ranking and influential Christian polemicists and apologists: seventh-century monk and priest John of Damascus and thirteenth-century Italian Dominican monk and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Falsely portraying Islam and Prophet Muhammad ﷺ was a key characteristic of the approach adopted by many Christian apologists. The Prophetic response to those who caricature Islam is to remain God-centric and morally upright.
As soon as Islam began to spread outside of Arabia, Christian theologians tried to engage with the new religion by way of negative polemics, despite having little familiarity with Islam. Michel Curtis writes:
“Rivalry, and often enmity, continued between the European Christian world and the Islamic world…For Christian theologians, the “Other” was the infidel, the Muslim… Theological disputes in Baghdad and Damascus, in the eighth to the tenth century, and in Andalusia up to the fourteenth century led Christian Orthodox and Byzantine theologians and rulers to continue seeing Islam as a threat.”1
Christian theologians viewed Islam either as heresy or as paganism. From those who saw Islam as heresy, some claimed Islam was a stray offshoot from Christian Orthodoxy, a specially Christian heresy. For those who saw Islam as paganism, Islam represented the antithesis of all Christian teachings. Both understandings, of course, contradict each other. On the one hand, Islam is a distorted form of Christianity; on the other hand, Islam has no connection at all to Christianity. The Christian clergy faced a serious theological challenge in Islam’s social and political rise to power. The subsequent growth of conversions to Islam further cemented the urgency and alarmism that the clergy experienced. As a sign of the confusion among the clergy at the sudden emergence of Islam, the ninth-century Byzantine monk and chronicler Theophanes found it hard to explain Islam as a phenomenon. John Tolan tells us that Theophanes was “baffled by Islam’s continuing success, Theophanes does not pretend to know what God has in mind.”2 It was from this position of confusion that Christian polemics against Islam developed.
This essay examines a historic Christian polemical tradition espoused by two high-ranking and influential Christian polemicists and apologists: seventh-century monk and priest John of Damascus (Yuhanna bin Mansur bin Sarjun) and thirteenth-century Italian Dominican monk and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Polemics was a key characteristic of many Christian attitudes to historic Islam. This polemical perspective is expressed by John of Damascus in his compendium The Fount of Knowledge.
The false portrayal of Islam and its prophet is not only restricted to the aforementioned Christian scholars, for instance, the work of the twelfth-century Cluniac monk Peter the Venerable also exhibits negative polemics. The sense of crisis amongst Christian apologists is also illustrated by the ninth-century priest Eulogius of Cordoba who wrote that “the church of the orthodox groans beneath his most grievous yoke and is beaten to destruction”.3 The ninth-century Cordoban Christian Martyr Movement felt threatened by the growth of Islam. The Andalusian Christian scholar and theologian Alvaro of Cordoba outlined his concerns about Islam in his letter directed to Speraindeus the abbot.4 His concerns are instructive in what they convey about the urgency felt by the priestly class. Alvaro complained that Christian youth had come to be particularly impressed by Arabic culture, religion and language instead of the Latin writings of Biblical scholars and church fathers. Alvaro writes:
“The Christians love to read the poems and romances of the Arabs; they study the Arab theologians and philosophers, not to refute them but to form a correct and elegant Arabic. Where is the layman who now reads the Latin commentaries on the Holy Scriptures, or who studies the Gospels, prophets or Apostles? Alas! All talented young Christians read and study with enthusiasm the Arab books; they gather immense libraries at great expense; they despise the Christian literature as unworthy of attention. They have forgotten their language. For every one who can write a letter in Latin to a friend, there are thousands who can express themselves in Arabic with elegance, and write a better poem in this language than the Arabs themselves.”5
Alvaro speaks of the cultural demise of Christian traditions where Christian Youth are flocking to adopt Islamic traditions. It is true that the Cordoban Christian Marty Movement expressed a sense of injustice and persecution of Muslims towards Christians. Kati Inhat, however, stresses how the Cordoban Christian Martyr Movement exaggerated descriptions of persecutions by Muslims for polemical reasons. There are strong reasons to view the movement as a form of Christian radicalism.6 The case of Cordoba shows the desperation of some of the Christian clergy to counter the attraction that Islam had on fellow Christians.
To be sure, the Qur’an condemns certain beliefs and practices of Christianity. As Thomas Wienandy observed, the Qur’anic condemnation led to a theological pushback from Christian intellectuals. The particular historical configuration of this period will sound unfamiliar to contemporary readers. The social matrix where theological debates and concerns were expressed had Jews partnering with Muslims in a joint aversion to Christianity’s Trinitarian belief. Both Muslims and Jews shared a close bond due to their rigorous affirmation of strict monotheism. Christians were seen as less connected to either Muslims or Jews. With regard to the presence of Judaism and Islam, Wienandy writes, “it is worth reminding ourselves that the novel revelation of Islam only reinforced the original Jewish insistence that God is one, which had figured trenchantly in the early elaboration of Christian doctrine. Why else can we surmise that it took four centuries to clarify the central teaching of Christianity about Jesus (Chalcedon, 451) out of which a full-blown trinitarian doctrine emerged?”7 This affinity between Muslims and Jews was not only on the level of theology but also socially and experientially. Jews suffered early under the seventh-century Visigothic kings Recared I, Sisebut and Chinthila. Later on, Muslims and Jews shared the same fate in the fifteenth century Catholic-led Spanish Inquisition. Anti-Trinitarian heresy targeted Muslims and Jews. It is for these reasons that, at least historically, Muslims and Jews were far closer to each other than they were with Christians.