Part 3

The author devotes the six remaining chapters of the book to a study of some common points between Islam and Christianity. They are : "The Names and Attributes of God;" "Scripture as the Word of God;" "God the Creator;" "God as the Lord of History;" and "Humanity in Relation to God." In "The Names and Attributes of God", Watt remarks that "to say that Muslims worship Allah and Christians worship God is ....like saying that the Germans worship Gott and the French Dieu." He points out that "there are several million Arabic speaking Christians in Egypt, the Lebanon and elsewhere who have no other word for God than Allah." Though the theological conceptions of God differ between Jews, Muslims and Christians, "worship and service is a relation to a Being, not to a conception; and Jews, Christians and Muslims, though their conceptions differ, worship the same Being".(p. 46)

We may admit what Watt says only with certain qualifications. Firstly, there are two concepts involved in the idea `worship of God.' The Muslims differ with the Christians not only in the conception of `God' (which includes the ideas of Trinity, incarnation and divinity of Christ), but also in the conception of what constitutes `worship'. The Arabic verbs `abada, ya'budu, and the noun `ibadah for worship, are used in the Quran in the sense of service. Though God is the Lord, the Master and Sustainer (al‑Rabb) of all creatures and they are His `ibad (slaves, servants, creatures), the good servants of God, the `ibad Allah proper, are referred to with additional epithets such as mu'minun (believing), mukhlisun (sincere), salihun (righteous), shakur (grateful), munib (penitent), or simply as 'ibadi (My servants) in the Quran. Therefore, `ibadah or `worship' is man's service of God as his Master and Lord, and includes the idea of obedience. The English term `worship' conveys only a devotional sense, and does not imply obedience to God's legal and ethical commands. It is, moreover, in the sense of service not merely of devotion that the Quran prohibits the `ibadah of the Satan (36:60) or the non‑God or taghut (39:17), where it is entirely independent of the ritualistic sense of devotion. The Christian `service' is also loaded with ritualistic and devotional connota­tion. Therefore, to say that all who believe in God‑in the common religious sense‑or worship Him‑in the sense of prayer and devotional rituals‑do not necessarily do the `ibadah of God, in the Islamic sense. `Ibadah refers to the realization of the `abd‑Rabb, (slave‑Master, servant­Lord) relationship in one's life. Therefore, in the Islamic sense a `worshipper' of God is one who serves Him and obeys Him and carries out His Will as given through the revelation. Accordingly, it is highly inaccurate to say that Jews, Christians and Muslims "worship the same God." The expression can be accepted only as a very crude approximation on the level of daily usage. The best way out seems to be that we may continue to use the terms `God' and `worship' for `Allah' and "ibadah' and leave it to God to judge who worships Him in actuality and how well.

In the same chapter while discussing the "Oneness or Unicity" of God, Watt remarks:

Christians also believe in the unicity of God [not the unity], one of their main statements of belief, the Nicene Creed, opening with the words, `I believe in one God.' At the same time, however, they also believe that God is in some way threefold. The doctrine of the Trinity, as it is called, is subtle and abstruse, and most ordinary Christians simply accept it without being able to explain it fully". (p. 49)

The doctrine of the Trinity is a necessary corollary of the belief in divinity of Christ and the Holy Ghost. Of the two only divinity of Christ is of greater emotional and doctrinal significance for the Christians. Islam rejects incarnation, whether in the case of Jesus or someone else. The Creator cannot be incarnated in a creature, though all creatures manifest His Creativity, Mastery and Sovereignty. According to Islam, the Essence of God is free of distinctions and divisions. It is, from the Islamic viewpoint, no more than play of words to say that most Christians believe in three hypostases in the Divine Essence not three separate divine entities. It does not matter whether three different things are packed separately on the level of conception as `gods,' or whether all three are put inside one package labelled `God'. As long as we have a Son distinct from the Father as two different essences with a peculiar relationship, the unity of or the unicity of Godhead is like an external and conventional unity of a  triumvirate, not an internal and essential unity. Moreover, the New Testaments, while they clearly support the idea of Christ's incarnation, also strongly imply that the `Father' is somewhat more divine than the `Son', who says to the former `yet not what I want, but what you want' (Matthew 27). The Father has greater authority and in fact he is more often referred to as being the `God' who sent `his only Son' into the world to forgive sins of men. The doctrine of Trinity was framed after the belief in Christ's incarnation had become fixed among a large group of Christians. The Church had to shield itself from the blames of polytheism while preserving the divinity of Christ intact; hence the `sophisticated incoherence' of the Nicene Creed. But the belief in Christ being the Son of God had become so prevalent in Christendom, and Christianity had become so irrevocably saddled with the idea of his divinity that the doctrine of three hypostases (lit. substances) was the best that theological expertise could achieve. There is some `sophisticated naivety' in this statement of Watt when he says:

It is commonly thought that the Quran criticizes the doctrine of the Trinity, but this is not necessarily so. Any statement about the matter requires to be carefully qualified. One of the verses dealing with the points is 5:73: `disbelieved have those who say God is the third of three; there is no deity except one deity'. Taken literally this verse is criticizing belief in three gods, not in three hypostases; and from a Christian point of view belief in three gods is a heresy, tritheism. Throughout the centuries there have probably been simple‑minded and badly instructed Christians whose effective belief may in fact have been tritheism, and there may well have been some such people in Arabia in Muhammad's times. In so far as this is so and the Quran is attacking tritheism, it is attacking a Christian heresy and orthodox Christians would agree with its criticisms (p. 50).

Watt here has tried to cast doubt on the Quranic disapproval of the doctrine of Trinity. However, even if it were possible to cast (though unjustifiably) any doubt on the Quran's rejection of Trinity, it is impossible to question the Quran's repeated rejection of the divinity of Christ and his incarnation (see the Quran, 4:172, 5:17, 5:72, 5:75, 9:30, 3:59, 4:171, 5:116). Moreover, if we view the Old Testaments, the New Testaments and the Quran as scriptures related to one religious tradition (which Watt is inclined to admit), it is somewhat difficult to accept that God should have maintained complete silence about a Son for two thousand years ago in the first instance, and again forgets that He had sent His son into the world six hundred years after sending him. It is somewhat difficult to accept that God should have stressed upon His Unity in His teachings conveyed to all prophets from Noah to Abraham and up to Moses, and then from Moses to John the Baptist, and then should become a Trinity for sometime, and then should disavow His Trinity in the Book revealed to Prophet Muhammad (S). The Muslims may not but consider the Christian doctrine of Trinity but as a relapse into polytheism on the part of the Jewish and non‑Jewish followers of Christ. The Jews, as the Old Testament bears testimony, were prone to relapse into polytheism and idolatry throughout their national history. However the relatively firm establishment of monotheism by the time of Jesus precluded any overt regression into idolatrous and polytheistic beliefs. Perhaps the limited polytheism disguised in the doctrine of Trinity was all that was possible for the polytheistic temperament to achieve within the monotheistic climate of the Hebrew culture, which was already subject to the stresses imposed by the pagan Romans' cultural, political, and religious influences.

Watt is aware of the responsibility inherent in belief (p. 135), which is parallel or even prior to the responsibility for one's actions, and is upheld in the Islamic and Christian teachings. This is because our world‑views, irrespective of whether we are theists or atheists, play a fundamental role in the organization of our entire scheme of life. Beliefs are inherited by children from parents or "from the view of reality current in the social milieu," together with other behavioural patterns, and one is, therefore, responsible at least partially for how the future generations shall believe, live and act. In order to judge any belief or act we must also take into consideration the consequences for the entire humanity if such a belief were held and practised world‑wide by all human beings. If one were to apply Watt's pragmatic criterion to the Christian belief in Trinity and speculate what would be the consequences for the entire mankind if the belief in the incarnation of Christ had not become prevalent among Christians‑a belief which resulted, not to speak of the Jew's alienation from Christ, in the denial of the prophethood of Muhammad (S) by millions of human beings since the period following Christ to the present day, and deprived them of the spiritual, intellectual and moral benefits of Islam, not to speak about the centuries of distrust if not hostility it has caused between two major sections of mankind‑one may wonder about the contribu­tion it might have made to the satisfactoriness of human life" on this planet. Perhaps it could have saved mankind from the crucial loss of meaning which has assumed cosmic dimensions in the modern world for some decades.