There are other implications of Trinitarian doctrine which concern Muslims. Perhaps one should briefly mention our worries about the doctrine of Atonement, which implies that God is only capable of really forgiving us when Jesus has borne our just punishment by dying on the cross. John Hick has remarked that 'a forgiveness that has to be bought by full payment of the moral debt is not in fact forgiveness at all.' More coherent, surely, is the teaching of Jesus himself in the parable of the prodigal son, who is fully forgiven by his father despite the absence of a blood sacrifice to appease his sense of justice. The Lord's Prayer, that superb petition for forgiveness, nowhere implies the need for atonement or redemption.

Jesus' own doctrine of God's forgiveness as recorded in the Gospels is in fact entirely intelligible in terms of Old Testament and Islamic conceptions. 'God can forgive all sins', says the Quran. And in a well-known hadith of the Prophet we are told:

On the Day of Judgement, a herald angel shall cry out [God's word] from beneath the Throne, saying: 'O nation of Muhammad! All that was due to me from you I forgive you now, and only the rights which you owed one another remain. Thus forgive one another, and enter Heaven through My Mercy.'

It is related that a boy was standing under the sun on a hot summer's day. He was seen by a woman concealed among the people, who made her way forwards vigorously until she took up the child and clutched him to her breast. Then she turned her back to the valley to keep the heat away from him, saying, 'My son! My son!' At this the people wept, and were distracted from everything that they were doing. Then the Messenger of God, upon whom be peace, came up. They told him of what had happened, when he was delighted to see their their compassion. Then he gave them glad news, saying: 'Marvel you at this woman's compassion for her son?' and they said that they did. And he declared, 'Truly, the Exalted God shall be even more compassionate towards you than is this woman towards her son.' At this, the Muslims went their ways in the greatest rapture and joy.

This same hadith presents an interesting feature of Muslim assumptions about the divine forgiveness: its apparently 'maternal' aspect. The term for the Compassionate and Loving God used in these reports, al-Rahman, was said by the Prophet himself to derive from rahim, meaning a womb. Some recent Muslim reflection has seen in this, more or less rightly I think, a reminder that God has attributes which may metaphorically be associated with a 'feminine, maternal' character, as well as the more 'masculine' predicates such as strength and implacable justice. This point is just beginning to be picked up by our theologians. There is not time to explore the matter fully, but there is a definite and interesting convergence between the Christology of feminist theologians such as Rosemary Reuther, and that of Muslims.

In a recent work, the Jordanian theologian Hasan al-Saqqaf reaffirms the orthodox belief that God transcends gender, and cannot be spoken of as male or female, although His attributes manifest either male or female properties, with neither appearing to be preponderant. This gender-neutral understanding of the Godhead has figured largely in Karen Armstrong's various appreciations of Islam, and is beginning to be realised by other feminist thinkers as well. For instance, Maura O'Neill in a recent book observes that 'Muslims do not use a masculine God as either a conscious or unconscious tool in the construction of gender roles.'

One of Reuther's own main objections to the Trinity, apart from its historically and Biblically sketchy foundations, is its emphatic attribution of masculine gender to God. She may or may not be exaggerating when she blames this attribution for the indignities suffered by Christian women down the ages. But she is surely being reasonable when she suggests that the male-dominated Trinity is marginalising to women, as it suggests that it was man who was made in the image of God, with woman as a revised and less theomorphic model of himself.

Partly under her influence, American Protestant liturgy has increasingly tried to de-masculinise the Trinity. Inclusive language lectionaries now refer to God as 'Father and Mother'. The word for Christ's relationship to God is now not 'son' but 'child'. And so on, often to the point of absurdity or straightforward doctrinal mutilation.

Here in Britain, the feminist bull was grasped by the horns when the BCC Study Commission on Trinitarian Doctrine Today issued its report in 1989. The Commission's response here was as follows:

'The word Father is to be construed apophatically, that is, by means of a determined 'thinking away' of the inappropriate - and in this context that means masculine - connotations of the term. What will remain will be an orientation to personhood, to being in relation involving origination in a personal sense, not maleness.'

The final point that occurs to me is that the Trinity, mapped out in awesome detail in the several volumes devoted to it by Aquinas, attempts to presume too much about the inner nature of God. I mentioned earlier that Islam has historically been more sceptical of philosophical theology as a path to God than has Christianity, and in fact the divine unity has been affirmed by Muslims on the basis of two supra-rational sources: the revelation of the Quran, and the unitive experience of the mystics and the saints. That God is ultimately One, and indivisible, is the conclusion of all higher mysticism, and Islam, as a religion of the divine unity par excellence, has linked faith with mystical experience very closely. An eighteenth century Bosnian mystic, Hasan Kaimi, expressed this in a poem which even today is chanted and loved by the people of Sarajevo:

O seeker of truth, it is your heart's eye you must open.
Know the Divine Unity today, through the path of love for Him.
If you object: 'I am waiting for my mind to grasp His nature',
Know the Divine Unity today, through the path of love for Him.

Should you wish to behold the visage of God,
Surrender to Him, and invoke His names,
When your soul is clear a light of true joy shall shine.
Know the Divine Unity today, through the path of love for Him.

آ© Abdal-Hakim Murad

British convert to Islam, Abdal-Hakim Murad, was born in 1960 in London. He was educated Cambridge University (MA Arabic), and at al-Azhar University, the highest seat of learning in Sunni Islam. He has studied under traditional Islamic scholars in Cairo and Jeddah, including Shaykh Ahmad Mashhur al-Haddad, and Shaykh Ismail al-Adawi. Abdal-Hakim Murad has translated several classical Arabic works, including Imam al-Bayhaqi's 'Seventy-Seven Branches of Faith', and 'Selections from the Fath al-Bari'. He is also the Trustee and Secretary of The Muslim Academic Trust and Director of The Anglo-Muslim Fellowship for Eastern Europe.