Do Muslims have a theology?

This is not a rhetorical question, folks! Let's have some rational discourse!

I dunno.

With Christianity and Judaism we see the impetus for theology in that we see a God who is an active agent in human history for direct salvation.

The Jews await the Messiah and commemorate as the most important holiday the Exodus from Egypt, an act orchestrated only by the grace and power of God, rather than by human strength of arms.

As Christians, we see the fulfillment of the promised Messiah in Christ and his substitutionary death for our sins on the cross and resurrection to life eternal. This miracle grounds our love and reverence and intellectual curiosity into the God whom we love "because he first loved us."

With Islam however, you have another garden variety faith based on merely human works towards salvation, and there is no historical act they can point to where Allah intercedes in the affairs of men to save his faithful either physically or spiritually, from death.

So is there really any desire to study a God who hasn't been seen to directly involve himself in human history in days of old?

Actually, Ken, I think just the opposite is true: Islam does not distinguish between the active and passive will of God. Everything that happens occurs because God directly willed it, not merely because he permitted it to happen. Physics does not consist in God-given laws to give order to the universe. If an apple falls, it falls because God wanted the apple to fall, not because he permitted it to fall.

As for Sal's question, I've been thinking about it all day, and I don't know the answer. Up until the 14th century or so, Islam's philosophers were the most advanced, but I understand that once they began doing text-criticism on the Koran, they were silenced.

I do know that Muslims are suspicious of any human science that might tend toward idolatry, or to provide false ideas about God. You can see they have a point, if you look at the various paper-gods invented by liberal theologians.

I went looking for books about Islam at a Catholic bookstore today and they ran the gamut of the somewhat polemical but true "Islam: A Catholic Perspective" by Jimmy Akin to a biography of Muhammad that made him look like the the greatest man that ever lived. I picked up "Moslems" by Gabriel Oussani and Hilaire Belloc because I figured I can't go wrong with something written by Belloc.

Over at Muhammad.net are a lot of documents about Muhammad and Islamic beliefs. In particular are the ones about how Muhammad is foretold in the OT and NT and that "the Paraclete" is not the Holy Spirit but rather Muhammad himself.

http://www.muhammad.net/biblelp/biblelp17.html

That's interesting and all but it just doesn't hold up.

The via negativa is a form of theology, and that is what Islam does with regards to Allah.
They then combine this with Eastern fatalism and various gnostic documents such as 1 and II Infants, extracts of which can be read in the Qu'ran and the Hadith.

Islam is basically what Don Brown is blindly backing into with his attempt to revive ancient forms of gnosticism (one only has to turn on TBN to find modern forms of Nicolaitanism)