Islam and Mormonism: Some Similarities and Differences (Fifth Part)

Finishing up with some very basic notes.

Differences (concluded):

Evangelization, in the Islamic view, tends to be a one-way street.  People can and should convert to Islam.  If a person converts from Islam to some other (necessarily inferior) religion, many Muslims will deem that person worthy of death.  The view that “apostasy” is a capital offense has been represented in Islamic law since roughly 800 A.D.  That is, it is a post-Muhammadan development, but nonetheless very old and deeply ingrained.  This represents an obvious problem for Latter-day Saints, who, by contrast, place heavy emphasis on religious freedom and “agency”—which, in our view, was a primary issue in the grand premortal council.  A related matter is the fact that Islamic cultures tend to emphasize social controls (for example, in segregating men and women, and covering women from head to toe), whereas Latter-day Saints are willing to pay certain costs (in allowing sin, to put it bluntly) in order to preserve the opportunity for freely-chosen virtue.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is hierarchical and centralized.  Authority flows, and direction is given, to local leaders from those holding the keys.  Islam, in contrast, and especially in its majority Sunni form, is extremely decentralized.  In fact, one cannot legitimately speak of a Muslim “church” or anything like it.  There is no Muslim priesthood (although the several Shi‘ite movements, notably the so-called “Twelvers” who dominate Iran, sometimes come close).  Instead, in the absence of a living prophet or even an analogue to the pope, leadership of the Muslim community has fallen into the hands of the so-called ‘ulama’, whose authority flows from their knowledge of the Qur’an and the other authoritative texts of Islam.  (They are roughly comparable to rabbis, in that regard.)

Authority, in Islam (and, again, particularly among its Sunni majority) resides in the past.  Knowledge of that past, and of the legal and doctrinal precedents to be found there—in the form of what are called hadith, or, roughly, “traditions”—gives the individual religious leader his power and authority.  This means that there is little room for innovation within Islam.  (The Arabic word bid‘a means both “innovation,” or “novelty,” and “heresy.”)  If innovation occurs, it requires a re-reading and re-interpretation of the already available canonical texts.  This is quite different from authority among the Latter-day Saints, where changes in practice, etc., can come quite suddenly, as in the case of the 1978 revelation on priesthood.  Islam’s solid base in the past, and the diffusion of interpretive authority among tens of thousands of “rabbis” from Indonesia to Morocco, from Saudi Arabia to Nigeria and Canada, makes it very difficult to hijack—and very difficult to reform or adapt.

Islam—particularly in its Iranian Shi‘ite form—places considerable emphasis on the idea of martyrdom, while Latter-day Saints, by and large, do not.  We do not believe, for example, that Joseph Smith went to heaven because he was murdered by an anti-Mormon mob.