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Islam and Mormonism: Some Similarities and Differences

Islam and Mormonism: Some Similarities and Differences

Last updated on: August 17, 2017 at 9:04 am by Dan Peterson

Islam and Mormonism: Some Similarities and Differences 2017-08-17T09:04:05-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Putrajaya Mosque, Malaysia (Photograph by Nazir Amin, Wikimedia Commons

A few notes that I threw together quite a few years ago. Comments welcomed:

Similarities

Both religions worship the same deity. Allah is related to the word Elohim. Allah is simply the Arabic word for “God,” and is the term used in the Christian Arabic Bible as well as the Arabic Book of Mormon and other Latter-day Saint materials. [Incidentally because it is in the Qur’an and because Arabic is the sacred language of Islam, Persians or Iranians sometimes use the Arabic Allah, but they typically use the Persian word Khuda—which is related to the English word God.]

In both faiths, God intervenes or acts in history. In fact, his primary self-revelation comes in his interactions with prophets and peoples over the course of history. (As opposed to, say, Buddhism, where religious truths are sought in the mind, through meditation initiated by the person himself, and history is relatively unimportant.)

Mormonism and Islam share substantial history. Both recognize God’s creation of the earth, and, thereafter, a line of prophets commencing with Adam and running forward through Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Jesus.

Although doctrine is certainly important in the two faiths, Islam and Mormonism have both tended to focus, as Judaism also does, on history rather than on theology (in the sense that mainstream Christians do theology). It is in history that the claims of the two faiths stand or fall. And both Mormonism and Islam, like Judaism, have tended to define whether one is a “good” follower of the faith by asking questions about behavior and practice—personal “history,” in a sense.

Both Islam and Mormonism are focused on scripture (much more so than Buddhism and Hinduism)—again, much like Judaism and mainstream (especially Protestant) Christianity.

Both faiths place a high priority on evangelizing non-adherents.

Both Mormonism and Islam see themselves as working to build societies that will embody their beliefs more fully. Just as Latter-day Saints speak of building “Zion” and of the eventual coming of the New Jerusalem and the Millennium, and look back to the city of Enoch, Muslims are exhorted to “command good and forbid evil” and to seek to put the shari‘a, Islamic law, into effect. The inner circle of the Prophet Muhammad is the ideal age to which they look back. This is to say that purely private, purely individual, practice of the religion, without regard to building a better society or interacting with other people, is seen as defective. “There is,” the Prophet Muhammad is reported to have said, “no monasticism in Islam.”

Both Islam and Mormonism see an end to history, which is moving in linear fashion toward a divinely-determined goal. There are many prophecies about the Last Days in both faiths, and these prophecies are, in a number of ways, rather similar. In Islam, Jesus will return and confront al-Dajjal, an anti-Christ figure. There will be earthquakes and great destruction and, finally, the Last Judgment.

All human beings will be resurrected—literally, bodily—and brought before God for judgment, in both faiths.

When the Prophet Muhammad died, a dispute arose regarding the succession. The group that came to be known as the Shi‘ites holds that his successor (the imam) must be his closest surviving male relative. The so-called Sunnis believe that the lineage of the successor (the caliph) is relatively unimportant, so long as there is a successor to enforce and interpret the law. There is obviously at least a superficial similarity here to the split between the Latter-day Saints and the Reorganized Church. (In practice, however, the line of Shi‘ite imams seems to have died out in the late ninth century, and the Sunni caliphate was abolished by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the reformist founder of modern Turkey, in the early twentieth century.)

The Qur’an is a book of revelations received by the Prophet Muhammad over the course of his twenty-two year ministry. The revelations are arranged, roughly, according to chronological considerations. It is not a narrative about Muhammad, and was not written by him, but is believed to represent the actual voice of God speaking to his prophet (either audibly or by internal inspiration). In several respects, it can be compared to the Doctrine and Covenants.

Islamic culture, like Mormon culture, tends to be patriarchal and to place considerable emphasis on the family. Many of our values (e.g., chastity) are similar. However, Islam allows greater latitude to a double standard than Latter-day Saints can tolerate. (In other words, female chastity tends to be more vital in Islamic eyes—in practice, although not in theory—than does male chastity.) And, while the family plays an indispensable role in Latter-day Saint doctrine and expectations for the afterlife, it appears to be more of a cultural matter in Islamic areas. (Illustration: Plural marriage was an innovation, mandated by revelation to Joseph Smith, in nineteenth century Mormonism. In Islam, although polygamy is permitted, it has no particular religious significance. Islamic law simply regulates a pre-existing practice.)

That said, however, it is clear (with all the talk of the houris, or the virgins of paradise) that Islamic expectations of the afterlife do include gender differentiation and continued sexual behavior. Although the parallel to Latter-day Saint doctrines relating to eternal marriage is only vague, it has been the object of considerable mockery among critics of the Church from the nineteenth century until today.

Differences

Islam and Mormonism conceive of God rather differently. Mormonism teaches an embodied God; at least officially (whatever ordinary, uneducated Muslims may believe, and though the Qur’an can easily—and, I think, should—be read otherwise), Islam teaches of a God without body or location. (There is overwhelming evidence that many early Muslims, probably including the Prophet Muhammad himself, believed in a corporeal deity.)

The line of prophets in Islam culminates with Muhammad, and the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not believe that any prophet can or will come after Muhammad. Mormonism has never recognized Muhammad as a prophet (though some Church leaders have been willing to describe him as inspired), but affirms the post-biblical prophethood of Joseph Smith and a line of successors.

The unforgivable sin in Islam is shirk. (The Arabic word means, roughly, “association,” but can be loosely rendered as “polytheism.”) To commit shirk is to worship or recognize any other deity beyond or instead of the one true God. Muslims are uneasy with the mainstream Christian view of the Trinity, despite Trinitarian protests that the Trinity is really just one God; they will, I think, tend to find Latter-day Saint references to “the Gods” (as in the Book of Abraham and elsewhere) rather disturbing. I see this as a potential flashpoint in our relations with Muslims. (However, historically, Muslims have learned to live more or less in peace with Hindus and other undeniably polytheistic groups, and even to evolve ingenious ways of considering them “actually” monotheists, so this can probably be managed. There is, obviously, as the Book of Mormon makes clear, a very powerful sense in which we too can truthfully say that we worship and believe in only one God. This will need to be emphasized in any theological discussions with devout Muslims, when and if they arise.)

Crucial difference: Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet, even a very great one, but only as a prophet. He is not the Son of God, for Islam recognizes no children of God. Qur’an 112 reads as follows: “Say: He is God, One. God, the Absolute. He does not beget nor is He begotten, and there is none like unto him.” (It is just remotely possible that Muhammad is not responsible for this passage. But I know of no way to prove it, and he probably was.)

While both Mormonism and Islam speak of the Virgin Birth of Jesus, Latter-day Saints do so to insist that Jesus’ father was not Joseph but God himself, with all that that entails for Jesus’ capacity to save us in his role as Savior and Redeemer. Muslims, by contrast, insist that Jesus was the “son of Mary.” He had no father at all, but was a miraculous sign from the all-powerful God.

Related to this point is the fact that, for Muslims, we are not all brothers and sisters because we are the children of the same God. They understand what Christians mean when such words are used, and may even be sympathetic to the point a Christian might be trying to make, but, in their view, God does not have children. We are creatures of God—no more related to Deity than the light bulb was related to Thomas Edison.

Another absolutely crucial difference: In Islam, God is sovereign and free. He can forgive (or not forgive) anyone he wants. Accordingly, Muslims see no need for an atonement. And their prophetic but human Jesus lacks the innate capacity to effect an atoning sacrifice. Mormonism, on the other hand, speaks of a cosmic law of justice that has to be satisfied, which even God (in some sense) is not free to ignore, and of Jesus as the perfect and divine sacrificial offering who settled a debt on our behalf that we could not have taken discharged by ourselves.

The Qur’an is absolutely central to Islam and Islamic culture, in ways that go far beyond the centrality of the Bible and other scriptures among Latter-day Saints. Qur’anic recitation—the Qur’an is chanted, and there are experts who actually become popular “stars” because of their chanting abilities and the quality of their voices—begins and ends each broadcast day on radio and television. Qur’anic verses are carved into stone on public buildings and sewn into tapestries and wall-hangings and inscribed by expert calligraphers on metal trays and framed parchments. Students learn to read and recite the Qur’an in Arabic, even if Arabic is not their native language. Great emphasis is placed on reciting the Qur’an properly, but relatively little is placed on understanding what it means. The words themselves are thought to be the words of God, and so there is power in simply saying them. But there are no study editions of the Qur’an, and it is unthinkable that anyone would ever take a MagicMarker to a Qur’an to highlight certain passages, or make notes in the margin. Muslims I have known have been appalled to see Latter-day Saints place their scriptures under a chair at a meeting; the Qur’an should never touch the ground, and readers should, ideally, have washed their hands and made themselves ritually pure before opening it. Some Western scholars have even argued that the best analogy to the Qur’an in Christianity is not the Bible, but the (mainstream) Christian view of the Son himself. Both Jesus and the Qur’an, they contend, can be regarded as “the Word,” as God’s eternal utterance, the tangible manifestation of God in this world. I think the comparison is apt. The same arguments that swirled around the relationship of the Father and the Son in the early apostate Christian church and culminated in the Nicene Creed were made, in Islam, about the Qur’an. (Was it created, or eternal? Etc.)

Evangelization, in the Islamic view, tends to be a one-way street. People can and should convert to Islam. If a person converts from Islam to some other (necessarily inferior) religion, many Muslims will deem that person worthy of death. The view that “apostasy” is a capital offense has been represented in Islamic law since roughly 800 A.D. That is, it is a post-Muhammadan development, but nonetheless very old and deeply ingrained. This represents an obvious problem for Latter-day Saints, who, by contrast, place heavy emphasis on religious freedom and “agency”—which, in our view, was a primary issue in the grand premortal council. A related matter is the fact that Islamic cultures tend to emphasize social controls (for example, in segregating men and women, and covering women from head to toe), whereas Latter-day Saints are willing to pay certain costs (in allowing sin, to put it bluntly) in order to preserve the opportunity for freely-chosen virtue.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is hierarchical and centralized. Authority flows, and direction is given, to local leaders from those holding the keys. Islam, in contrast, and especially in its majority Sunni form, is extremely decentralized. In fact, one cannot legitimately speak of a Muslim “church” or anything like it. There is no Muslim priesthood (although the several Shi‘ite movements, notably the so-called “Twelvers” who dominate Iran, sometimes come close). Instead, in the absence of a living prophet or even an analogue to the pope, leadership of the Muslim community has fallen into the hands of the so-called ‘ulama’, whose authority flows from their knowledge of the Qur’an and the other authoritative texts of Islam. (They are roughly comparable to rabbis, in that regard.)

Authority, in Islam (and, again, particularly among its Sunni majority) resides in the past. Knowledge of that past, and of the legal and doctrinal precedents to be found there—in the form of what are called hadith, or, roughly, “traditions”—gives the individual religious leader his power and authority. This means that there is little room for innovation within Islam. (The Arabic word bid‘a means both “innovation,” or “novelty,” and “heresy.”) If innovation occurs, it requires a re-reading and re-interpretation of the already available canonical texts. This is quite different from authority among the Latter-day Saints, where changes in practice, etc., can come quite suddenly, as in the case of the 1978 revelation on priesthood. Islam’s solid base in the past, and the diffusion of interpretive authority among tens of thousands of “rabbis” from Indonesia to Morocco, from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria and Canada, makes it very difficult to hijack—and very difficult to reform or adapt.

Islam—particularly in its Iranian Shi‘ite form—places considerable emphasis on the idea of martyrdom, while Latter-day Saints, by and large, do not. We do not believe, for example, that Joseph Smith went to heaven because he was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob.

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