Derya Little has a disarming smile and a slight glow. It is very difficult to dislike her and few people seem to try. Perhaps, therefore, she is ideally placed to take on one of the most perilous and unfashionable topics in modern religious and political discourse: why Islam isn’t true.
Derya is a former Muslim, a convert to Catholicism and the author of a new book, From Islam to Christ. She spoke to me this summer about her journey.
Derya is Turkish. She was baptised in Ankara but was received into the Catholic Church in England and now lives in America. Her westward path is not, as it happens, a matter of personal security but purely coincidental. That being said, her homeland has become far more Islamic than it was when she left it. As she explains in her book, the secular Turkish republic founded after World War I wanted its people to be Muslim but not too Muslim. At the time this provided a safer context for conversion than that faced by many Middle Eastern catechumens.
She was born in the 1980s. It was after reading the Koran and the hadiths (canonical traditions concerning Mohammed) that she rejected the religion of her country and family. “After having read these accounts with fresh eyes,” she says, “I was appalled at how so many people, including myself, could blindly follow this man.”
Her initial response to this experience was to turn not to Christianity but atheism. Although she came from a town evangelised by St Paul himself, for her, Christianity felt alien and the very idea of it scarcely crossed her mind.
As a teenager she assumed that atheism led to Marxism. This is not a popular assumption among the so-called New Atheists, who are keen to distance themselves from communism and the millions of corpses it piled up in the 20th century. Derya explains that the claim of Marxist regimes to represent “scientific atheism” – simply the logical extrapolation and application of the denial of God – should be taken more seriously.
“Outside of Christianity,” she observes, “there is never a true sense of human dignity. Any one person is dispensable. Who cares if one million people die if in the future six billion people will be happy? I think I like the Marxists better than the New Atheists. They are more honest.”
Her rejection of Islam coincided with the breakdown of her family and her personal moral compass. It is clear from her account that her and her mother’s abandonment by her father was psychologically significant in creating the environment in which Derya left Islam. I ask how she would react to the criticism that she has projected the failure of her own father on to the Muslim deity.
“Well, of course,” she laughs, “they are very similar in character. Muslim men resemble the God they worship. So do Christian men (or at least they should). Maybe Muslim men are a little more loyal to their own God than Christian men, but the fundamental equality of the sexes before God is ineradicable from Christianity.”
Derya only encountered Christianity years later at university in Ankara, while giving Turkish tuition to an American Evangelical. Over many long conversations the Gospel began to transform her life and her view of the world. Eventually she was baptised and a second transformation began.
Just as reading about the life and personality of the founder of Islam had initiated her estrangement from that religion, so her discovery of the unsavoury character and self-contradictory doctrines of Martin Luther began to make her doubt the coherence of the Protestant account of Christianity. Derya was finally received into the Catholic Church as a doctoral student in Durham, the city of St Cuthbert and St Bede, and completed her remarkable journey by marrying an American soldier. She now lives as a US citizen with their four children on the far side of the Atlantic.
An intriguing moment in her journey to Catholicism came when she was discussing the doctrine of the Trinity with her Protestant friends. Derya struggled with the idea that the being she had been taught to worship as a child was the living God in whose name she had now been baptised. But she was also wrestling with the Protestant doctrine of Sola scriptura.
The two problems crashed headlong into each other when her friends concluded that, as it would be difficult for the average person to extrapolate the doctrine of the Trinity in all of its nuances out of Scripture unaided by tradition, belief in the Trinity must not be necessary for salvation.
The crucial moment when Derya first encountered the Gospel was when she saw a sign inside the door of her pupil’s apartment reading: “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” Now this was being taken from her: faith in the true and living God, which had led her away from Islam, must now be sacrificed at the altar of Luther’s revolt against the Catholic Church. This troubling conversation drove her on to seek the true authority instituted by Christ to preserve His Gospel until the end of time.
It was clearly important to her conversion and the loss of her childhood religion that the God Derya worshipped as a child was not the God who called Abraham and who revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. I ask her how she responds to those who say that the Church at Vatican II explicitly teaches that Muslims worship the same God as Catholics.
She replies: “The God of Muslims (I always call him ‘Allah’ and our God ‘God’) is not the Creator of the universe because he is not rational or loving; he is irrational and capricious and the master of slaves.
“When a sin is a sin only because Allah decides it is there is no need for Christ’s sacrifice. No need for love. Islam embodies servile fear in its perfection. There is no filial fear, no fear of disappointing the God of love, only fear of punishment.”
She says she wishes she had made this distinction clearer in the book. “But that just shows the folly of writing anything without reading the Summa [Theologiae] first.”
This doesn’t mean, she says, that all Muslims are worshipping an idol. “Most Muslims are uninformed about their beliefs, like most Christians in the West. Most Muslims just practise the religion of the elders, of their family, and with a desire in their heart to please God. In their naïvety, I don’t think they worship an idol, but then I am not God.”
Thus, according to Derya’s understanding, an ordinary Muslim is by default striving to worship the true God known through reason (as described in Romans Chapter 1).
For all her horror at Luther and frustration at the Protestant view of Scripture, Derya laments that it is Protestants who end up taking the strain when it comes to evangelisation and that the modern Catholic Church no longer seems to want to spread the Gospel. Why does she think this is?
“Is it OK to say ‘Vatican II’?” she asks. “I don’t want to offend everybody.”
But, she argues, it is less what Vatican II necessarily said than the “spirit of Vatican II”. The problem, Derya says, is that “understood the way most people read it, the Council creates this great confusion. ‘Is it better for me not to tell people about Jesus so they won’t have the opportunity not to believe and so be damned eternally?’
“Of all the problems created by ‘the spirit of the Council’, I think this is the worst, because everybody uses it to say ‘my conscience is clear’. No! Your conscience is messed up. Everybody’s conscience is messed up. If we could find salvation by just doing our best then there would be no reason to preach or to believe.”
…….
To some extent Derya’s story is one of a person who did strive by her deeds to do God’s will as it was known to her through the dictates of conscience. Is she saying that this striving was a consequence and not a cause of her encounter with the Gospel?
“Before meeting my American friend,” she says, “I had quieted the voice of the Holy Spirit, but hearing the Gospel again and again in our conversations He began to speak to me. I don’t want people to think that I revived the morality of my upbringing. It is a completely different moral system. I learned God’s nature from my friend as a rational, loving and pure God. If that is God’s nature then He would expect his creatures to be the same.
“Of course I was reading the Bible this whole time in Turkish and learning that God made man and woman in his image, and their dignity comes from this. So, all this time my conscience was being formed, although there were not any ‘moral dictates’ that we talked about.”
It was noticeable in the course of our conversation that a number of times Derya emphasised that the true God is “rational, loving and pure”. In the book she discusses the different relations of Islam and Christianity to state violence. The main difference, it seems, being that coercive conversion of non-Christians is forbidden in Christianity. For Derya, the origin of this divergence lies in the two religions’ disparate understandings of God.
“If God is Logos – reason itself – as Christians believe, then coercion can never be an acceptable way to bring someone to baptism. When some Christians began to depart from this – I think it was with William of Ockham – then the path that led to Protestantism and the Enlightenment and the modern secular dissipation of the West began. The funny thing is that modernity and its nemesis, Islam, are based on the very same error.”
Towards the end of her book, Derya seems to suggest that the West is facing an existential crisis. Islam is a sustainable social model, actually capable of replacing Christian civilisation, while the Enlightenment which has seized power in the West, especially since the fall of communism, is just a parasite.
She explains: “The Enlightenment is a misguided reaction, a rejection of Christianity in the public sphere. Whether we like it or not, the religion of a society shapes its culture. As Christianity exits the West, there is nothing else to replace it. Abortion, euthanasia, the rise in depression and suicide, the break-up of the family are nothing but symptoms of this nothingness. Now that Christianity, the only thing that kept Islam at bay for centuries, is on its way out, Islam is more than willing to fill the vacuum. However, the culture Islam offers will be disagreeable to most, but it will give the lost individual of the West a place to belong to and a family to go back to.
“As TS Eliot says: ‘If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.’ Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.’ ”
From Islam to Christ by Derya Little is published by Ignatius Press. Alan Fimister is assistant professor at St John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver
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