ABSTRACT

How do Muslims and Christians regard their martyrs? Chapter Two of this book explores the changing and ambivalent attitudes of Christians to the veneration of saints and martyrs, and how the Church came to impose limits on this by seeking to legitimize some candidates as saints and martyrs, while rejecting others. Criteria for canonization by Roman Catholics eventually came to include the working of miracles.1 In the Qurʼan, on the other hand, the power to work miracles is reserved for God, who uses a little of it from time to time on behalf of prophets, like Moses and Jesus, in order to evoke belief in the truth of the messages they bring from Him. The Qurʼan is fairly scathing, though, about those who need miracles to help them believe:

The truth of Godʼs message is self-evident, to ʻthose who use their reasonʼ, ʻthose who have minds ʼ and so on, and is backed up by the witness of prophets, believers, angels, and oaths based on the phenomena of Godʼs creation. The Qurʼan hails Christians as the ʻclosest in affection ʼto Muslim believers because:

Yet there were others who remained unmoved and defiant, even though:

The Qurʼanic concept of miracles (even natural wonders) as proof of Godʼs power is a subtly but radically different concept from that of the Christian Church, where miracles are recognized as proof of Godʼs power working in individual human beings. Although the Qurʼan says that those who die ʻin Godʼs way . . . are alive, though you do not realize it ʼ(2:154), they have no power to intercede to help anyone in this world, and even on the Day of Judgement it is only those to whom God gives permission who can intercede on anyoneʼs behalf:

The strongest message of the Qurʼan, therefore, confirming the First Commandment in the Law of Moses, is that all prayer and worship should be directed to God, who is ʻcloser to man than his jugular vein ʼ(50:16), and not to others lesser than Him, who ʻ can neither benefit nor harm even themselves ʼ (13:16). Even ʻthe Messiah would never disdain to be a servant of God, nor would the angels who are close to Him ʼ (4:172). In practice, though, the attitudes of Muslims to the veneration of saints have always varied. Muslims live in nearly all parts of the world and no one Islamic government, even the caliphate, has ever had the power to control or even influence the remoter rural areas to any great extent. Reform movements have arisen in different parts of the Muslim world at different times, based on a return to strict monotheism. The twelfth-century Almohads (muwahhidun) in North Africa (wahid means ʻoneʼ), and the eighteenth-to twenty-first-century Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia are examples. However, amongst the general Muslim population, veneration of saints and martyrs has persisted. For instance, in Egypt the veneration of the Prophetʼs descendants (not all of them martyrs) dates from the Shiʼi Fatimid dynasties in the early centuries following the Prophetʼs death and has some echoes of Pharaonic worship of Isis,2 as well as the influence of the Christian Coptic Church.3 Strictly monotheistic reform movements do not appear to have had a great deal of influence there. Shaikh Shaltut,4 a respected shaikh of al-Azhar,5 in a book of fatwas (1965), disapproved of some of the practices associated with the veneration of saints:

But

Nonetheless Shaikh Shaltut did not adopt the very strict and even violent attitude of the Saudi Wahhabis, who have sometimes destroyed shrines and tombs of saints to make their point. He argued that:

Furthermore, he maintains that:

Despite such fatwas (scholarly legal opinions), the practices of veneration and respect for the deceased members of the Prophetʼs family continue to be observed in Egypt, even by some educated, wealthy professional women, who come to pray in the mosques attached to the tombs of female relatives of the Prophet in Cairo. (The tombs are not inside the main prayer area of the mosque but in separate rooms.) The cult of saints in Egypt also involves many women and poor people in prayer and charitable giving, mainly of food, making pledges in return for answers to their prayers,8 and in many places seems to act as a temporary stand-in for the more expensive religious obligation of pilgrimage to Mecca. Even the strict Saudi Wahhabis of modern times are not immune from being turned into martyrs and venerated. In an article in The Independent on 28 October 2004, Niko Meo describes the veneration paid in Afghanistan at the graves of al-Qaʼida and Taliban martyrs, who are even said to cure illnesses. He concludes:

The Christian Perspective

It has often been suggested that the cult of saints and martyrs became popular in Western Christianity because of mass conversions of polytheistic pagans in the late Roman period, especially after Constantine. Many of these converts were supposed to have retained their old polytheistic attachments, by simply transferring them to the new Christian context through devotion to the multitude of the saints and martyrs instead. The cult is thus alleged to have arisen because it was an easy way of keeping up belief in a multiplicity of beings to adore and celebrate, while at the same time adhering to the new faith. It was admitted that Church authorities tried at times to control the growth of the new superstition, but could not afford altogether to discourage the ʻvulgar ʼfrom their new enthusiasms. Very influential post-Enlightenment thinkers – for example, David Hume and Edward Gibbon – endorsed this version of what happened. While, according to Hume, ʻno rational enquirer can, after serious reflection, suspend his belief a moment with regard to the primary principles of genuine Theism and Religionʼ, he clearly thinks that the cult of saints and martyrs is a superstitious absurdity, from which he himself is, of course, exempt. ʻThe heroes in polytheistic paganism correspond exactly to the saints in popery, and holy dervises [sic] in Mahometanismʼ, he says. ʻThe place of HERCULES, THESEUS, HECTOR, ROMULUS is now supplied by DOMINIC, FRANCIS, ANTHONY, AND BENEDICT.ʼ9 Although Gibbon, too, professed what he called ʻthe pure and perfect simplicity if the Christian modelʼ, he also held that ʻthe worship of saints and relics corrupted ʼit.10 This ʻtwo-tiered ʼ model, of popular superstition over against elite enlightenment, has been challenged by modern scholars such as Peter Brown, according to whom it was for the most part the solidarity between the living and the dead members of Christian families that established the cult of the martyrs.11 This had nothing to do with popular superstition, but rather with belief in the possibility of bridging the gulf between this world and the next (something abhorrent to pagan polytheism):

This belief, that those who died as saints and martyrs are our intimate friends, albeit on the far side of the grave, lay at the root of the cult. Indeed, influential Christian families often appropriated the body of a dead member of their own group, by burying it in a place to which they alone had access, in order to gain spiritual benefits for themselves. Bishops commonly deplored such ʻprivatization ʼof a spiritual asset which ought to be available to the whole community. They saw the Church as an extended family based on spiritual kinship, all of whose members were entitled to the benefits of praying to and with their close friends, the saints and martyrs. Privatization of the cult of martyrs by influential families was often the target of authoritative wrath, as in the case of St Augustineʼs De cure gerenda pro mortuis.13 Brown chronicles numerous examples of the tension between prominent Christian families who sought privately to care for, and indeed seek intercession from, their own dead in their own burial places, and the Church authorities who sought to make the tombs of saints and martyrs accessible to the whole community.14 As the Churchʼs wealth grew, buildings and ceremonies associated with those who had died for the faith became more elaborate, and feasts were held near their tombs with the saint ʻpresidingʼ. The martyr would be ʻthe good patronus, whose intercessions were successful ʼ and whose potentia was exercised without violence, so that ʻloyalty could be shown without constraintʼ.15 Typically, martyrs ʼgraves in Late Antiquity were outside town centres, so pilgrimages to shrines naturally developed, especially with the practice of the transfer of relics to other places. More importantly, the cult brought the poor and women into prominence. It ʻoffered a way of bringing [women and the poor] . . . under the patronage of the bishop, in such a way as to offer a new basis for the solidarity of the late-antique townʼ.16 The cult gave women a public role they had lacked, both as recipients of blessings and as givers of alms to the poor. This picture of the martyrs as our intimate family friends, who are happy to give us their help as servants of God who have demonstrated ultimate perseverance, even to death, in love of the faith, bears little resemblance to the ʻtwo-tiered ʼconcept of popular superstition which later became a Protestant and Enlightenment cliché. In medieval England devotion to, and intercession for and by, the martyrs included all social levels, from knight to miller, as the dramatis personae of Chaucerʼs Canterbury Tales shows. Even King Henry II himself had to make amends for the murder, and accept the subsequent canonization, of his erstwhile friend, Thomas Becket. It is easy to see that there is plenty of room for superstition and abuse in the Christian cult of martyrs and saints, and no doubt over the centuries many people have fallen into superstitious habits because of it. It was at least partly in reaction to such abuse that the churches of the Reformation made a clean sweep of all shrines and cults associated with any saints or martyrs other than those of the apostolic age, and both the Protestant and the Reformed traditions have tended to exclude them altogether from liturgical commemorations, stressing always that the believer has direct access to God through faith. But

in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, at any rate, praying with, and to, the martyrs is not seen as implying the need of any kind of mediation for being able to pray to God; instead, it is seen as praying with and in God, because it is praying with and in Christ who is God. This is why all such prayer is ʻthrough Jesus Christ Our Lordʼ. But for Muslims, every time Christians pray ʻthrough Jesus Christ Our Lord ʼthey cut themselves off from Muslims, Jews and others, including some Christians, who pray directly to God. God, in the Qurʼan, asks Christians to agree with Muslims that:

To Muslims, only God is ʻour Lordʼ. At the deepest level, then, this difference between the faiths over the veneration of martyrs and saints raises profound theological questions which lie beyond the scope of the present book.