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Last week's interview with Laurent Guyénot stimulated much discussion and controversy. Some listeners wanted to hear more on miracles and what Islam says about them, while others insisted that Guyénot's critique of Christianity is misguided.

Canadian Muslim author Eric Walberg and I discuss miracles. Walberg discussed anomalous events in general, and miracles in particular, in his review of Jeffrey Kripal's How to think impossibly about souls, UFOs, time, belief, and everything else. Since my doctoral dissertation compares medieval Moroccan miracle stories to contemporary personal experience narratives of anomalous events, I've thought about this topic quite a bit, which is why I didn't want to go off on such a huge tangent during last week's conversation with Laurent Guyénot. So today's the day for the tangent.

Guyénot suggested that Islam is less concerned with miracles, and more compatible with secular rationalism, than Christianity and Judaism. Though he isn't entirely wrong, it's actually a lot more complicated than that. Tune in for the details.

Excerpt addressing Guyénot’s question about Islam and miracles

Kevin Barrett: Laurent Guyénot raised the issue of how religious schools of thought (specifically Islam) think about miracles. In Christianity we know that they are considered religiously significant. When an alleged miracle or a story of a miracle comes to the attention of the church authorities, and they think it might be religiously significant, they investigate it. And it can end up becoming a proof of somebody's sainthood. They believe that miracles are related to whether or not somebody deserves to be canonized as a saint.

And in Islam, there's a parallel process with saints' miracles, which are called karamat al-awliya. But there's no institutional bureaucracy that decides whether or not this particular story is legitimate and whether it's a real karama or miracle. So the two types of religiously significant miracles in Islam are the saints' miracles, the karamat al-awliya, and then secondly, the mujiza.

The mujiza is a miracle of the prophets that God sends as proof of the prophet's mission. In Islam it's widely accepted that the prophet Muhammad peace upon him, the last and seal of the prophets, brought as his main miracle the message itself: the Qur’an. There are stories of other miraculous events around him, but they're all secondary to the main miracle of the message.

So those are the two religiously significant kinds of miracles: the mujiza, the miracle or proof of a prophethood—and that would include all of Jesus' miracles that we discussed, as well as Moses parting the Red Sea, etc.—and then there are the karamat, the saints’ miracles. But then what do you do with all of these other things you're talking about Eric like levitation? Some guy posts a video of himself levitating. How would muslims or christians think about that?

In Islam, it’s generally accepted that there are these kinds of events that may not have the religious significance of a prophet's miracle, a mujizah, or a saint's miracle, a karama. And probably the term that gets used the most often is the khariq al-ada خارق العادة which it means the shredding of habit or habituality. So the idea is