If C.S. Lewis would have studied Islam, here's what he would have found.

C.S. Lewis Would Have Studied Islam. Here’s What He Would Have Found.

Let me tell you the thing about Lewis that his fans tend to underestimate.

They love him for his warmth. For the talking animals and the magical wardrobe and the image of God as a great lion who is not safe but good. They love Mere Christianity for the way it makes the faith feel like the most obvious thing in the world once someone has the nerve to say it plainly. They love his letters and his grief and his wit and his ability to make a reader feel that being a thinking Christian is not a contradiction in terms.

All of that is real. None of it is the deepest thing about him.

The deepest thing about Lewis is that he followed arguments where they led regardless of where he hoped they would go. He called himself the most reluctant convert in all of England, dragged into belief kicking and struggling. He did not want to be a Christian. He had built good reasons not to be. He followed the logic anyway, step by step, because he had decided earlier in life that intellectual honesty was non-negotiable and he was not willing to make an exception for his own comfort. He described the moment of conversion not as a rush of warmth but as the recognition that he had run out of road. The argument had arrived somewhere, and he had to decide whether he was going to be the kind of person who went where the evidence pointed or the kind who stopped when the evidence became inconvenient.

He chose to go where it pointed.

That instinct, that specific stubbornness about following an argument to its actual conclusion, is what I want to apply to Islam. Because Lewis would have. He was not the sort of man who left a significant religious claim unexamined. He spent years reading Norse mythology, Greek philosophy, Eastern mysticism, and Naturalism precisely because he wanted to understand what each system actually claimed before he decided what he thought of it. He had no patience for the kind of cultured vagueness that refuses to engage a claim seriously because engaging it seriously might require you to say something uncomfortable about it.

He would have picked up the Quran. He would have read the Hadiths. He would have followed the argument.

I am going to do it for him.

The Method First

Lewis had a method that is worth naming before we apply it, because the method is the thing that makes the exercise worth doing.

He believed that ideas have consequences, that a belief system is not judged by its best advertising but by where its load-bearing claims actually lead when you trace them out honestly. In Mere Christianity he applies this to the question of Jesus: a man who said the things Jesus said is either Lord, lunatic, or liar, and you cannot escape the trilemma by the comfortable middle path of calling him a great moral teacher and nothing more. The middle path looks generous. Lewis showed that it is logically incoherent. A great moral teacher does not claim to forgive sins on his own authority. Either the claim is true, or the man making it is not great.

He applies the same logic in The Abolition of Man to moral relativism. You cannot, he argues, simultaneously appeal to moral standards when arguing that something is wrong and deny that objective moral standards exist. The person who says “there is no objective morality” and then says “but what the Nazis did was genuinely evil” is using two incompatible tools in the same argument. Lewis follows the argument to where the incompatibility breaks through and names it.

That is the method. You take the system’s own claims seriously. You ask what they actually require. You follow them to where they lead and you report honestly what you find there.

Applied to Islam, the method produces several observations that most people in this conversation are not willing to make out loud. I am going to make them out loud, with the same fairness Lewis would have demanded, which means crediting what is genuinely strong before examining where the load-bearing joints give way.

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