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

declared the concept of human free will to be heretical.
    A twelfth-century Muslim jurist, Ibn Abi Ya’la, fulminated that the Qadariyya wrongly “consider that they hold in their grasp the ability to do good and evil, avoid harm and obtain benefit, obey and disobey, and be guided or misguided. They claim that human beings retain full initiative, without any prior status within the will of Allah for their acts, nor even in His knowledge of them.” Even worse, “their doctrine is similar to that of Zoroastrians and Christians. It is the very root of heresy.” 70
    This “very root of heresy” does indeed involve “an unworthy conception of God.” The idea that God created automatons that cannot but do as God wills—including reject him and suffer in hell for all eternity—is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian understanding of God. In Islam, not only is Allah not a father, he a slave master, and one so cruel that he creates beings for hell—in other words, he brings them into existence solely so that he may torture them. He does offer these wretched creatures a path to life, but bars them, solely on the basis of his arbitrary whim, from ever finding or embarking upon that path.
    This is not the God who “so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” Indeed, the God of the Qur’an has no son to give, since it would be an offense to his transcendent majesty even to have one.
    A God of both light and darkness
    As we have seen, the Catholic concept that mankind’s alienation from God is manifested in an inclination toward sin is utterly alien to Islam. In Islam there is no concept of original sin. Although Adam and Eve begin in Paradise and are banished from it after their disobedience, and Satan vows to tempt the believers, ultimately even this is a manifestation of Allah’s active will. In the Qur’an, it is only Allah who inspires in the soul both “lewdness and godfearing” (91:8). The world-renowned Pakistani Muslim political leader and theologian Syed Abul Ala Maududi (1902-1979), who wrote a popular and influential commentary on the Qur’an, explains that this verse means that “the Creator has imbedded in man’s nature tendencies and inclinations towards both good and evil.” 71
    That means that Allah is ultimately responsible not just for the soul’s inclination toward good but for its inclination toward evil as well. In other words, in sharp contrast to the Christian understanding that evil is the rejection of God, in Islam God is the source of evil. This is worlds apart from the proposition that “God is light, and in Him there is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5)—for to place evil in the soul, Allah must have it to give, which would be utterly impossible in the Christian conception, since evil is the absence of God.
    The Islamic concept casts the very goodness of God into doubt, as well as the nature of what is good. The grand and powerful Christian conception of a God who is love, and who endowed his human creatures with freedom so that they could respond to him in love, and who sacrificed himself in order to overcome impediments to their ability to do so, is replaced by the idea of a remote God who for reasons unexplained put both good and evil within man’s heart.
    Allah is will
    But for a believing Muslim, to suggest anything else would be blasphemous. No limits can be placed upon the sovereignty of Allah, the absolute monarch. That includes ones that would naturally arise from his being always good and true. Allah, the Qur’an says twice, is the best of “schemers”: “And when the unbelievers were devising against thee, to confine thee, or slay thee, or to expel thee, and were devising, and God was devising; and God is the best of devisers” (8:30; cf. 3:54). In this “devising,” Allah has no limitations whatsoever.
    Indeed, at one point the Qur’an excoriates the Jews for suggesting