OPINION:
Last week, in this column, I wrote of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to be sworn into office with his right hand placed on the Quran. I then asked some questions every logical observer should ask: Does Mr. Mamdani believe what this book teaches? For example, does he believe in its explicit endorsements of child slavery, forced marriage, institutionalized misogyny, forced conversions, capital punishment for sexual immorality and the beheadings of nonbelievers?
I went further. Is Mr. Mamdani an advocate of violent jihad and the military conquest of the Christian world? After all, the specific copy of the Quran on which he chose to take his oath was published during the time of the Ottoman Empire, when Islam’s military expansion was at its peak.
Why did Mr. Mamdani choose this specific edition of the Quran? Was it to highlight and extol Islamic imperialism? If not, why not?
Most readers understood why these are reasonable questions and why we would be foolish not to ask them. After all, the mayor’s chosen scriptures are replete with verse after verse that promote the aforementioned things. It is also irrefutable that the present behavior of millions of Muslims around the world seems to confirm that they take these Quranic instructions and the corresponding history of Islam quite seriously.
Some critics, however, responded to my column with some indignation.
“But what about your Bible?” they asked. “It also promotes slavery, misogyny, military conquest and the execution of nonbelievers. Most of this stuff is also allowed if not encouraged by your Christian God, so who are you to judge Muslims?”
How should we respond?
Frankly, this argument is very foolish. How many Christians do you know who believe in child marriage, capital punishment for adulterers, forced conversions or the beheadings of those who leave the faith?
I’ll ask it again: How many Christians do you know who believe this?
The answer is zero. Why? Because Christians understand the difference between descriptive literature and prescriptive literature.
Christians understand that the Bible is written in many genres and that God has revealed his truth through poetry, prose, prophecy, parables and, as I said above, both descriptive and prescriptive literature.
We know that over the centuries, God has communicated with humanity in the context of our brokenness and sin, and we understand the obvious: Just because the Bible describes David’s adultery with Bathsheba and his subsequent murder of her husband Uriah doesn’t mean God is prescribing that we go do the same.
The church has understood this interpretive principle for 2,000 years and has applied Scripture accordingly. For example, no Christian believes the Old Testament’s “war verses” that describe the Canaanite conquest are teachings for how we are to treat our neighbors and live today. No Christian thinks God’s description of how he judged an evil people who were literally sacrificing their children in the burning furnaces of Moloch is intended to trump the Sermon on the Mount or the story of the Good Samaritan.
So, no, child slavery, forced marriage, misogyny, legalized wife beating, beheadings and forced conversion at the point of a sword are never promoted in the Bible. Is some of this stuff described? Yes. Is it prescribed for followers of Christ? No. Never.
The opposite is true for much of Islam (as much as 80%, according to some Pew research). Why? The answer lies in the “doctrine of abrogation,” an Islamic principle that holds that the later verses in the Quran always abrogate (i.e., trump and supersede) the earlier ones.
Guess what. The Quran’s violent verses are the later ones, which is the exact opposite of Christianity.
Don’t let anyone tell you the Bible teaches the same thing as the Quran and that both books promote murder, slavery, rape, the subjugation of women and “death to the infidel.” It’s simply not true, and 2,000 years of Christian faith and practice prove it.
Has Western civilization stumbled a time or two over the millennia? Yes, but it’s Christian morality that has always been the correction, not the cause.
One final note on the matter of “imperialism and colonialism”: Isn’t it a bit ironic that any junior high reading of history shows that the most imperialistic and violent colonizer of the past 1,000 years was Islam? As I mention above, the Ottoman Empire serves as the quintessential proof thereof.
In fact, it was only after 500 years of Islam’s violent expansion across much of Europe, Northern Africa and the Mediterranean Middle East that Pope Urban II, at the behest of Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, finally launched the Crusades to stop the butchery. Thank God he did, or we would all be living in a country much more like Iran than the United States of America.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host. He is the author of “Not a Day Care: The Devastating Consequences of Abandoning Truth” (Regnery). He can be reached at epiper@dreverettpiper.com.
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