Re-examining Islam as Heresy and Blasphemy

I have been toying with this idea for some time, and will expand on this post or in another larger one altogether. The term "mohammedan" is usually objected to by Muslims based on their claim that the worship Allah and not Mohammad (though I find this stance questionable). However, what if you line up the claims of Mohammad as found in the Quran and view them in light of the blasphemy that they are, setting Islam next to other historical heresies? Arianism, Docetism, Gnosticism, Mohammedansim, etc.

This idea has made sense to me for quite some time. After all, are Christians and Jews REALLY to accept Islam in earnest? To accept that our deity actually told Mohammad the "revelations" that make up the Quran? Why would Christians accept that Jesus was not in fact the Son of God? That believers in him were admonished by allah to his "prophet" and that we shall be punished for our beliefs? Or the many other absurd "revelations" that Mohammad received, seemingly when he wanted his way?

Islam is, in my opinion and the opinion of many, nothing more than a cult of personality surrounding a man suffering from increasing delusions of grandeur as his career as an erstwhile "prophet" continued, and I see no reason for this view to become the dominant view for both Jews and Christians. The idea of "interfaith" discourse is absurd when one of the faiths involved blasphemes and threatens the other two, not to mention the other religions of the world. Historically, the relationship between Judaism and Christianity has not at all times been a pleasant one, yet the one is an offshoot of the other. Christianity is heretical in regards to Judaism, but it was born of a schism in belief over whether the Messiah had come and had been Jesus of Nazereth or not. It was not a new religion built upon scant knowledge of Judaism, or of both of these Abrahamic religions as was Islam. Thus I think that it is wise to consider Islam a "mohammedan heresy" rather than a religion on it's own standing per se.

In looking at this idea, I came across the words of a Catholic theologian, Hilaire Belloc, in his piece The Great and Enduring Heresy of Mohammed. Though written in 1936, I found his ideas to be rather prescient and reflective of the nature of Islam and the threat that it has always posed to the West, even though he writes of it as being a rather broken religion at the time of his writing. Belloc was all too aware of Islamic theology and doctrine, and asks a question most pertinent and almost prophetic (pardon the pun) for his time:

"Millions of modern people of the white civilization—that is, the civilization of Europe and America—have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.

There is another point in connection with this power of Islam: Islam is apparently unconvertible. The missionary efforts made by great Catholic orders which have been occupied in trying to turn Mohammedans into Christians for nearly 400 years have everywhere wholly failed. We have in some places driven the Mohammedan master out and freed his Christian subjects from Mohammedan control, but we have had hardly any effect in converting individual Mohammedans.

It has always seemed to me possible, and even probable, that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent.

Why this conviction should have arisen in the minds of certain observers and travelers, such as myself, I will now consider. It is indeed a vital question: "May not Islam arise again?"

In a sense the question is already answered because Islam has never departed. It still commands the fixed loyalty and unquestioning adherence of all the millions between the Atlantic and the Indus and further afield throughout scattered communities of further Asia. But I ask the question in the sense, "Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake off the domination of Europeans—still nominally Christian—and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?"

The editor's note explains a bit more regarding the doctrine of "heresy":
"Editor's note: In calling Islam a heresy, Belloc is speaking loosely. A heresy is a movement of baptized Christians who deny part of the Christian faith; Muslims are not baptized. Though the early history of Islam was shaped by Jewish, Christian, and Arab pagan influences, it was a new religion, not simply a splinter from early Chritianity. The fact that Islam is not technically a heresy takes nothing away from the accuraby of Belloc's historical exposition and his prescience regarding the dangers of Islam's global re-emergence."


It did not take a 9/11 or even the birth of the Nation of Israel for Belloc to write these words, merely an understanding of the nature of Islamic (or mohammedan) beliefs and nature. This piece is considered a "classic" in Catholic apologetics, and the rest of the article, though very much Catholic in nature and theology, is still a work that endures simply because of the threats we face stemming all from the Cult of Mohammad.

To be continued at What Would Charles Martel Do? in greater depth and detail, as I believe that this is an idea whose time has more than come again.