welcome
and thank you all for joining us today
for the final program of the rabia oil
series for the love of the prophet
sallallahu alaihi wasallam
in this seven part series we have hosted
conversations with scholars in
commemoration of the life of the prophet
salallahu alaihi wasallam
for today's session we are honored to
have dr anna moreland in conversation
with president hamza yusuf
president hamza yusuf promotes classical
learning in islam and emphasizes the
importance of the tools of learning
central to muslim civilization and known
in the west as the liberal arts
he is currently president of zatuna
college and has published numerous
articles
essays encyclopedia entries and
translations including
the prayer of the oppressed and
purification of the heart
please welcome president hamza youssef
peace upon you first of all i want to
thank all of you for
joining us in this final session
uh celebrating the uh
the prophet sallallahu islam in this
month of
which in arabic means the first spring
i we're really i think fortunate to be
joined today with
a very serious scholar a theologian
and academic at villanova university i
first
came to know of dr anna ponte moorland
uh at the dominican college where she
was
uh inducted there a fellow in in the
college at which is a really a sister
college
of uh zatuna college up here on what we
call
in berkeley the holy hill because of the
many
um religious colleges that are on the
hill
dr ann moreland gave a talk that day and
i was really really impressed with her
talk
and i wanted to uh just i
i introduced myself afterwards and and
was very interested
in her work i i did not know at the time
that she'd actually written a book
about the prophet muhammad
and how christians should understand the
prophet muhammad which i subsequently
read
and really really enjoyed and benefited
a great deal
from it so she is the associate
professor of theology in the department
of
humanities at villanova university one
of the great catholic colleges in the
united states
she's been a professor since 2006 she
regularly teaches an introductory course
in theology as well as courses
on interreligious dialogue especially
between jews christians and muslims so
within the abrahamic
traditions her research has focused on
comparative theology between
christianity and islam
drawing upon the work of saint thomas
aquinas
and she is the author of the book that
we're going to
among other things discussed tonight
which is entitled
muhammad reconsidered a christian
perspective on islamic prophecy so
dr morland welcome and really thank you
for giving us your time tonight
thank you dr youssef i'm delighted to be
here with you this evening
zoom is a wonderful thing it's a very
interesting
uh paul simon said these are the days of
miracles and wonders this is the
long-distance call
so uh you know this book is a
it's a it's just despite the brevity of
the book
uh it's just slightly over 130 pages
it's actually a very dense book
and i i am used to reading dance books
but there's a very subtle
argument that you're putting forward and
it's obviously an incredibly complicated
topic
because we have 1400 years
of christian muslim engagement
sometimes violent uh
as in the crusades and also the muslim
assaults
on places like uh france and um
and vienna but also other times like
during the period of
the con conviviality that occurred in
spain and
also a lot of people aren't aware of the
extraordinary
experiences during the um crusader
occupation of palestine where there was
actually a lot of muslim
christian interaction and then
there's also another eastern christian
story which is
told by uh dr penn from stanford in
in a couple really extraordinary books i
don't know if you're familiar with them
but what i'd like to uh to really ask
you as a
as an opening uh question is
what what compelled you to to work in
this area
given the vast uh area of
catholic theology that i'm sure you've
been engaged in for a large part of your
life
great well that's an important question
and it's it's going to be
tempting for me to take up the whole
half hour to tell you what led me to
writing this book because i'm a catholic
theologian
i am i'm was i'm not a scholar of the
quran
i was not trained even in comparative
theology but 15 years ago i began
teaching at villanova university
and i taught a course on
aquinas ebsena and maimonides a sort of
medieval model for interreligious
dialogue
and the second time i the second
iteration of that course i decided that
it was a really
not a very successful course for
undergraduates for 18 to 22
year olds so i kind of zoomed out and
started teaching about the birth and
early development of judaism
christianity and islam
and over the course of 15 years of
teaching that course
theological and philosophical questions
started to bubble up
to the surface it's an historically
driven course
um so i began to write you know to try
to
answer questions for myself basically
that were sort of
pedagogical methodological and also just
personal to me right i had begun to
teach the quran
in a catholic university context and
i wanted to understand what i was doing
i wanted to
be sure that what i was doing was
faithful to my own religious tradition
because i do believe in the universal
significance of jesus christ right so
how can i teach these different
traditions
islam and judaism in a way that that
teach it that respects the fact that
they're living traditions
and that these texts are sacred for a
people you know i didn't want to take a
sociology sociology of religion
perspective and at the same time i began
to be involved in the scriptural
reasoning movement i don't know if
you're familiar with that movement but
jews christians and muslims coming
together reading
the new testament the hebrew scriptures
and the quran around a particular theme
and not having to sort of represent your
own tradition
but coming to the text to these three
different sacred texts
with vulnerability and with openness
with one a set of new friends
and so that personal practice her
religious practice
also began to shape me and i went back
to my own tradition to ask the question
if i am if i'm encountering the quran as
a sacred text
am i becoming a muslim that was a pretty
personal question for me
right and how do i teach this text in a
catholic university context so
i went back and and found
resources deep within my own tradition
that
helped me answer that question and i
found um
the question that i that sort of frames
the book
is what can catholics make of the
prophecy of muhammad
and so i marry documents from vatican
ii which is a meeting of 2500 bishops
from 1963 to 1965 mary what
um those documents said about the kind
of groundbreaking claims that catholics
made
in the early 60s about the overlapping
web of beliefs between catholics and
muslims
marry that to then a recovery of thomas
aquinas on prophecy
a medieval account a medieval christian
account of what prophecy means
in order to answer this question of um
what
sort of i build a theoretical openness
for the possibility
that muhammad could be a prophet for
christians
so it's a pretty traditional argument i
use very traditional catholic sources
and yet i end up at a place that's not
at all traditional
if that makes any right no it makes
perfect sense and i
i think that's what fascinated me most
because
i think you highlight some of the other
attempts
at doing this from uh some of the
protestant
and even catholic hans kuhn is a good
example of somebody
and i've i've actually read him on islam
and found it very fascinating
uh but i think what you did is is very
similar to
what one of my teachers
who argues that the tradition because of
its richness
we can always find the answers
for present conditions within the matrix
of the tradition we don't have to
be modernist in that way exactly but we
have to look
in a with really in a sense with new
eyes
at the tradition so that we can see
things that maybe
they didn't even see it themselves
despite the fact they were articulating
arguments uh that that can be drawn out
like you did in this book
just for our muslim listeners here i i
want to
uh quote and then you can maybe talk a
little bit about this
because a lot of muslims aren't aware of
uh like nostrada
and and some of the the radical changes
really that the
vatican ii initiated from the
traditional
no salvation outside of the church
approach
of the of the the pre-modern church but
uh
so the the uh the nostrada
take affirms about muslims they worship
the one
god living and subsistent merciful and
almighty creator of heaven and earth
who has spoken to humanity and to whose
decrees
even the hidden ones they seek to submit
themselves wholeheartedly
just as abraham peace be upon him to
whom the islamic faith
readily relates itself submitted to god
they venerate jesus peace be upon him as
a prophet
even though they did not acknowledge do
not acknowledge him as god
and they honor his virgin mother mary
and even sometimes devoutly call upon
her
furthermore they await the day of
judgment when god will
requite all people brought back to life
hence
they have regard for the moral life and
worship god especially in prayer
almsgiving and fasting
and that's a pretty bold statement i
think from the church especially at the
time but
there have been critiques of that and
maybe you could uh
address that a little bit yes so
there are definitely critiques of both
nostradate and lumengencia which is a
companion document on the ground group
breaking claims that
catholics made about muslims but the two
words that do not occur in those
documents
are muhammad and the quran
uh so it's pretty astonishing that the
church
the catholic church were to say these
these
to proclaim these overlapping web of
beliefs you know there are six
uh attributes for example that
catholics and muslims share we adore the
one god together lumen gentium says
and to say that all those
really kind of radical we we share some
pretty radical
claims religious claims the true
traditions and yet to be completely
silent
on the founder of islam to be completely
silent on the document that that that's
revealed
by god to muslims right um
i will uh give the the bishops in the
early 60s a little bit of slack they
were operating from a hermeneutic of of
consent right so that um the bishops did
were very careful about the language
that they used they didn't want to put
in language that they couldn't get a
majority vote
those each word in that docu in that
section that you selection that you read
was discussed at length and argued over
at length uh
so i guess i i will admit that it was a
compromise document of sorts right
right well i i and i understand that
process because i actually
was involved in some of the catholic
muslim
dialogues at the vatican and i was on a
committee
where we had to come up with a joint
statement right that involved
theology and it was just very
interesting back and forthing
between their theologians most of them
from germany
and uh and and the muslims that were on
the committee as well
so it was very interesting um
one of the things that i think is is
is fascinating to me and and
and i i want to just ask you i don't
know how familiar
you are with some of the work that's
been done
most of it is actually surprisingly uh
was done some time ago
but there's a very interesting reverend
robert hammond
who wrote a book called the philosophy
of farabi and its influence on medieval
theology
and he goes into great detail and
shows uh literally side by side
passages from the summa and and then
passages that were written 300 years
before
from al-farabi that are almost
identical and his argument and he was a
christian priest but his argument
was well i'll just quote what he says
about his book that
my efforts will have been amply rewarded
if this book enables the reader
to find through its pages two facts
first that al-farabi was well acquainted
with greek philosophy
so well acquainted in fact that he was
able through diligent study to perfect
some of its old theories
and work out new ones second that the
school men
albertus magnus and saint thomas aquinas
and others
borrowed from him a great amount of
material which hitherto has been
regarded by many as a product of their
speculation
while in reality it is not injustice to
al-farabi and other arabian thinkers
we should candidly admit that christian
philosophy owes a great deal to them
and i think to buttress your argument i
it has to be fascinating to people that
are fair
to see the influence that uh
avicenna had that averroes had that
al-farabbi had even al-qazali
on some of the most foundational
texts of catholic theology and and i
just
i can't imagine how
one can't see and and you you quote the
verse more than once in the uh
in the book by their fruits you shall
know them
and these are certainly the fruits of
islamic civilization
that i think were were ate and digested
by some of the great schoolmen of the
catholic tradition
i agree one thousand percent one
thousand percent even the translations
of some of aristotle's works
into the latin world world of course
came through the arabic right so
um the cross-pollination of these
traditions is
has been true for centuries no doubt
about it and i
and i think arguably also there in the
early period there was
a a serious influence of christian
uh tradition mainly from the syriac
scholars some of the great syriac
scholars
of that of that time that were
translating the great
uh hellenistic works into arabic that
had a massive influence and i think an
influence that
many many muslims are unaware of um
they we we tend to see islam as the
quran and the sunnah
and yet there is a vast tradition and
what
what fascinates me and i think what
what's important about your work
is that your i think
you're really bringing the next stage
of a serious engagement and
and and i think that for me
the the catholic church when we get in
at the metaphysical level
when we get into the catholic tradition
and the islamic tradition
the dovetailing that starts happening
and we see this our students see this
because they read aquinas
with our metaphysicians and
and they're just they're flabbergasted
and we've had
two graduates that have gone to catholic
um higher uh uh ed
uh training so one went to the dominican
college
and actually gave the uh commencement
speech there
when he graduated um and and we have
another one who's studying in belgium at
a catholic college
uh studying metaphysics and so for me
i find it very tragic that there's not
more
interaction and understanding especially
amongst the catholic
uh lay people
and obviously there there there's
historical reasons for that there's also
i think a fear and you address this
towards the end of the book
where to