Free Not Peace but a Sword: The Great Chasm Between Christianity and Islam by Robert Spencer

him the good tidings of forgiveness and a generous wage” (36:9-11).
    If the prophet succeeds in warning only the one “who follows the Remembrance and who fears the All-merciful in the Unseen,” it would appear that the only people who will heed the call of Islam are those who have already been destined to do so: those who already in some way “fear the All-Merciful.” There are even some to whom it doesn’t matter whether or not the prophet preaches, for even if they hear his message they will not believe it. Allah has made them blind to its truth: He has “put before them a barrier and behind them a barrier; and We have covered them, so they do not see.”
    The obstinate unbelief of those who reject Islam thus appears to be entirely in accord with the will of Allah. The Tafsir al-Jalalayn explains that this passage offers a “metaphor for how the path of faith is closed” to the unbelievers. 65
    At first glance, this may seem to be not far from Jesus’ words: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. With them indeed is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah which says: ‘You shall indeed hear but never understand, and you shall indeed see but never perceive. For this people’s heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart, and turn for me to heal them’” (Matt. 13:13-15).
    Indeed, Islamic tradition shares with Catholic tradition the idea that repeated defiance of God can render one’s soul insensitive to grace. That appears to be the case in many passages of the Qur’an, such as one recounting the reaction of hypocrites to a new revelation that Muhammad has delivered: “And whenever a sura is sent down, they look one at another: ‘Does anyone see you?’ Then they turn away. God has turned away their hearts, for that they are a people who do not understand” (9:127).
    But in Islam there is more. Another Qur’an commentary explains Qur’an 36:9 as meaning that Allah has “covered the insight of their hearts (so that they see not) the Truth and guidance.” 66 Ibn Kathir, whose Qur’an commentary is one of the most widely respected among Muslims, records that one early Muslim also ascribed unbelief to Allah’s will: “Allah placed this barrier between them and Islam and Iman [faith], so that they will never reach it.” 67
    Other Qur’an passages state this explicitly. “We have created for Gehenna,” Allah says in a Qur’anic passage that directly echoes Jesus’ quoting of Isaiah, “many jinn and men: they have hearts, but understand not with them; they have eyes, but perceive not with them; they have ears, but they hear not with them. They are like cattle; nay, rather they are further astray. Those—they are the heedless” (7:179).
    Despite the superficial similarity of the “eyes but see not and ears but hear not” motif, there is an immense gulf between this and the statement of Jesus, which most exegetes throughout the ages have taken to mean that some people harden themselves so in unbelief that when they hear the truth of God, they do not recognize it as such. In the Qur’anic passage, by contrast, Allah says that he actually created some people (as well as the mysterious spirit beings known as jinn) for hell—a doctrine that is hard to reconcile with the idea of a just and loving God.
    Even as the Qur’an repeatedly affirms that no one can believe except by Allah’s will, it also affirms that unbelievers bear responsibility for their actions. In this passage these two propositions are placed side by side with no hint that there is any difficulty: “And those who break the covenant of God after His compact, and who snap what God has commanded to be joined, and who work corruption in the earth—theirs shall be the curse, and theirs the Evil Abode”