Robert Spencer, an authority on Islam, has written many books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (And the Crusades), The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims, and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith. In a recent article, Spencer makes a most interesting observation.
In his landmark book The Abolition of Man, the Christian apologist C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) assembled examples of what he called the Tao, or the Natural Law: principles held by people in a wide variety of cultures and civilizations. These principles include “Duties to Parents, Elders, Ancestors”; “Duties to Children and Posterity”; The Law of Good Faith and Veracity;” “The Law of Magnanimity”; and more. He illustrates the universality of these principles by quotations from sources as diverse as the Old Testament, the New Testament, Virgil’s Aeneid, the Bhagavad Gita, Confucius’ Analects, the writings of Australian Aborigines, and many others. But completely missing are any quotations from the Qur’an or other Muslim sources.
Spencer goes on to say,
Lewis may have found that traditional Islam simply does not uphold what he calls “The Law of General Beneficence”; one is not to be charitable except to fellow believers. To be sure, Lewis could have quoted a hadith in which the Muslim Prophet Muhammad says: “Whoever wishes to be delivered from the fire and enter the garden should die with faith in Allah and the Last Day and should treat the people as he wishes to be treated by them” (Sahih Muslim 4546). This certainly appears to affirm the Law of General Beneficence. But it is contravened by so many other passages in the Qur’an and Hadith that make such a sharp distinction between believers and unbelievers (the “vilest of creatures” according to Qur’an 98:6) that it becomes an essentially empty statement, or one in which “the people” to which Muhammad refers are understood as Muslims only. After all, “Muhammad is Allah’s Apostle. Those who follow him are ruthless to the unbelievers but merciful to one another” (Qur’an 48:29).
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