Islam

A Guide for Jews and Christians

F. E. Peters

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781400825486
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

The Quran is a sacred book with profound, and familiar, Old and New Testament resonances. And the message it promulgated, Islam, came of age during an extraordinarily rich era of interaction among monotheists. Jews, Christians, and Muslims not only worshipped the same God, but shared aspirations, operated in the same social and economic environment, and sometimes lived side by side, indistinguishable by language, costume, or manners. Today, of course, little of this commonality is apparent, and Islam is poorly understood by most non-Muslims. Entering Islam through the same biblical door Muhammad did, this book introduces readers with Christian or Jewish backgrounds to one of the world's largest, most active, and--in the West--least understood religions.
Frank Peters, one of the world's leading authorities on the monotheistic religions, starts with the central feature of Muslim faith and life: the Quran. Across its pages move Adam, Noah, Abraham, David, Solomon, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary. The Quran contains remarkably familiar accounts of Genesis, the Flood, Exodus, the Virgin Birth, and other biblical events. But Peters also highlights Muhammad's very different use of Scripture and explains those elements of the Quran most alien to Western readers, from its didactic passages to its remarkable poetry.
Peters goes on to cogently explain Islam's defining features--including the significance of Mecca, the manner of Muhammad's revelations, and the creation of the unique community of Muslims, all in relation to the Judeo-Christian tradition. He compares Jesus and Muhammad, describes Islamic commandments and rituals, details the structures of Sunni and Shi'ite communities, and lays out central Islamic beliefs on war, women, mysticism, and martyrdom.
The result is a crucial and extremely accomplished book that offers Western readers a professional yet highly accessible understanding of Islam, and at a time when we need it most.

1.

Discovering Scripture in Scripture

THERE is only one way to approach Islam and that is to open and read from the pages of the Quran. The Muslim will prefer to hear it, but for the non-Muslim, the Muslim Scripture is almost always a book and not the “recitation” (al-quran) that its Arabic title announces it to be. It is by no means an easy read. The Quran, or Koran, as it is sometimes spelled, bristles with obscurities and ambiguities. Highly emotive poetry—or so it appears; the non-Muslim is normally relying on a translation, which is not very kind to poetry—alternates with an often pedestrian didacticism. Even in translation, the Quran has the sound, look, and feel of a patchwork, an assemblage.

These are aesthetic judgments made by a palate unused perhaps to another culture’s high delicacies, and as such they are of no matter. Or they would be save that this book itself, or the person speaking through it—its “voice”—challenges others who doubt its authenticity to try to duplicate it. The Quran is, on its own testimony, nonpareil, or to use its own term, “inimitable.” But there are other elements of this fundamental Islamic text that attract the attention, often the surprised attention, of the Jewish or Christian reader. On those same pages unfolds a terrain that is at once familiar and alien. The familiar is quickly characterized: the Quran is biblical, and biblical in the expanded sense favored by the Christians. Across its pages pass Adam and Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, David and Solomon, and yes, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Virgin Mary.

“IN THE BEGINNING . . .”

The Quran’s account of Creation is similar to that of the Bible in intent and some detail: both insist on an omnipotent creation from nothing, for example, and on the Creator’s fashioning of humankind. It is not laid out here in the linear narrative fashion of Genesis (or of other books of the Bible), however. It is immediately apparent that the Muslim Scripture is a collection of revelations, which Muslims claim were given by God to Muhammad over the last twenty-two years of his life. In our copies of the Quran these revelations are divided into 114 suras, or chapters, although some of the suras almost certainly contain more than one revelation, and they are arranged not in the order they were delivered but according to their descending length. Rather than a single narrative or story, the Quran is an assembly of “occasional” revelations bestowed under particular circumstances, some of which we can plausibly identify and many others we cannot. Thus, the events of God’s Creation are introduced at various appropriate points—appropriate to God’s purpose of warning and instructing—rather than at the very outset on the linear narrative model of Genesis. Genesis tells the story of Creation; the Quran simply alludes to it. When Creation events are cited in the Quran, they are generally in resume form and presented as moral examples, to underline God’s power, for instance, or his goodness.

THE NAME(S) AND NATURE OF GOD

Who is this deity? In Exodus 3:14 Moses boldly asks God his name and the response is (in Hebrew) ehyeh (“I am”) asher (“who” or “that which”), whose meaning—“I am who I am”? “What I am” ? “What I will be”?—is by no means clear. The Israelites called him something very similar, Yahweh, which shows up as early as Genesis 2:4. Here God is called Yahweh Elohim, perhaps “the divine Yahweh, ” but the two names often appear apart as individual names of God, with Yahweh usually translated into English as “Lord” and the plural Elohim as “God.” The Creator is chiefly called Allah in the Arabic Quran, though Muslims later counted ninety-nine appellations for the deity in that book, a phenomenon that gave rise to a variety of practices and beliefs in Islamic circles. Allah was well known in pre-Islamic Mecca—his shrine was the chief one in the town—and to the Arabs generally before Islam. Muhammad thought of him—and preached him—as the same God worshiped by the Jews and Christians. Some Muslims prefer to leave the name untranslated in English, but that gives the impression of Allah’s being alien or exotic instead of the same deity referred to by most English speakers as God (capitalized), the Divine Creator and Final Judge of monotheism.

Whereas Jews shied away from using any of the names of God available from Scripture and increasingly resorted to circumlocutions like ha-Qodesh barukh hu (“The Holy One, Blessed be He”), Muslims followed the Quran’s lead that God’s were “the most beautiful names” (7:180, etc.), and they developed numerous cult practices, devotional, mystical, and magical, around the quranic names. Most directly, God’s names could be recited as a form of prayer, sometimes counted out by means of a subha, thirty-three or ninety-nine beads strung out in the form of a chaplet—the Eastern Christian prayer rope and Western Christian rosary were modeled on the Muslims’ subha—though among more profane Muslims this handheld prayer calculator eventually degenerated into the omnipresent Middle Eastern worry beads. Sufis incorporated the litany of divine names into their regular dhikrs, or group “séances,” and mystics eagerly sought out the unique “true” name of God, assumed to be one among the canonical ninety-nine, that would reveal his inner being. Finally, the most beautiful names, because of their formulaic nature, were frequently used on amulets and in other forms of apotropaic magic.

The Quran insists, Muslims believe, and historians affirm that Muhammad and his followers worship the same God as the Jews (29:46). Conceptually, at least, this is true. The Quran’s Allah is the same Creator God who covenanted with Abraham and dispatched the prophets to their tasks, and although he is perhaps more dominantly central to the Quran than Yahweh to the Bible, he is not portrayed in the same manner as his biblical prototype. The Allah of the Quran is at once more powerful yet unmistakably more remote than Yahweh. Allah controls all, but from a distance; he is a universal deity quite unlike the Yahweh who in the early books of the Bible follows close on every step of the Israelites. Allah had his own, quite different history, which we can to some extent construct from the cult of the deity of that name who in pre-Islamic days was worshiped all across the Fertile Crescent and Arabia by the polytheistic Arabs. Though both the Quran and its Meccan audience knew at least part of that history, very little of it is laid out in the Quran. Later Islamic generations, who cared nothing about Allah’s pre-Islamic career, had the quranic portrait of their God filled out by Muslim authors, many of them converts from Judaism or Christianity, who were well aware of Yahweh’s biblical history, but the Muslims’ notion of God, though in its main lines identical with the Bible’s, has very different nuances of detail. The portrait of Yahweh that unfolds in the Bible is both more complex and psychologically nuanced and more directly engaged in history, if not in secondary causality, than the majestic but rather abstract and remote Allah of the Quran. Allah: A Biography is not a very plausible project.

THE BIBLE IN THE QURAN

The Quran’s links to the Bible continue well beyond Creation. Before the Quran ends, it has touched on Adam, Cain and Abel, Noah and the Flood, Abraham and his sons Ishmael and Isaac, Lot, Jacob, Joseph and his brethren, Moses and Aaron, the Pharaoh, the escape of the Israelites from Egypt, Saul, David, Solomon, Jonah, and Job. Jesus and Mary have their own considerable place there as well, as we shall see. This is a fairly extensive repertoire, but the absences are equally interesting. Though the Quran was obviously interested in prophecy and the prophetic office, and many of the early biblical figures from Adam to Solomon are treated as prophets, the classic prophets of the biblical canon like Jeremiah and Isaiah—two of the prophets most favored by Christians—are not mentioned at all. The Exile and the Return are likewise ignored, as is all subsequent Jewish history. The Quran was interested in history in a very narrow sense. When Muhammad speaks in Scripture, he is not so much explaining the past as he is using it, and the biblical stories in the Quran are generally told for a reason: sometimes as signs, demonstrations of God’s power, justice, or goodness, or, more commonly, as punishment stories about the consequences of ignoring prophets, particularly when they refer to the people of Abraham, of Lot, of Noah or Moses.

The Quran speaks often and at times at length of the Children of Israel—the Banu Israil, who in its eyes constituted both a community (umma) and a religion (din). Unlike the legislation of the Christian Roman Empire, which reserved the designation religio uniquely for Christianity and characterized Judaism as superstitio, the Quran recognizes multiple religions in the world, of which Islam is one, along with that of the Children of Israel, the Christians, and the pagans, “those who associate (others) with God.” Of these latter Muhammad is made to say in the Quran, “To them their religion and to me, mine.” The community of the Children of Israel is tribal—it takes Muhammad some time, and probably some Jewish assistance, to sort out the correct progenetic sequence of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel—but its religion is scriptural. Like Christianity and Islam after it, the din of the Children of Israel is founded on the contents of a divinely revealed Book. Jews and Christians are in fact often characterized in the Quran simply as “People of the Book” without further description or distinction.

Although there were other divine books, like that given to Abraham (Quran 87:19), the primacy of honor in the Israelite revelation belongs to the Torah (Tawrat) sent down to Moses. Moses is central to Muhammad’s closure with Judaism, and this is true from the very earliest of the quranic revelations. The Torah revelation, its prehistory, form, and modalities, is the prototype of the quranic one. And it is Moses’ example, particularly in his dealings with the Pharaoh, that provides the moral paradigm—persecution, then vindication—of Muhammad’s own mission. Muhammad also understands that his Book is a confirmation of what has been sent beforehand to the Jews through Moses (2:41). Indeed, early in his career, the Prophet had been instructed by God to turn to the Jews if he had any doubts about the revelation sent down to him, and the Meccans are offered as a proof of the truth of Muhammad’s message the fact that “the scholars of the Banu Israil know it” (26:196–197).

The presence of so much biblical matter in the Quran has prompted suspicion among non-Muslims that from the outset Muhammad was in contact with Jews who served, wittingly or unwittingly, as his informants. We have no evidence that there was a permanent Jewish colony at Mecca, as there certainly was at Medina, but it seems likely to think, given the considerable presence of Jews in the Yemen to the south and in the oases to the north of Mecca, that Jews passed through the town and that their beliefs and practices were familiar, to some degree, to Muhammad and his contemporaries—more familiar indeed than they are to us since we have little idea of the shape and heft of seventh-century Arabian Judaism. The issue of whether Muhammad “borrowed” anything from that quarter for his own message may come down to the degree of originality one is willing to grant to prophets, or, more pertinently, to other people’s prophets. Islam was, and is, not simply a warmed-over version of Judaism, or of Christianity, for that matter, although some earlier Christians thought so. It was a unique vision—whether from God or inside Muhammad’s own head is precisely what separates the Muslim from the non-Muslim—preached with great conviction, and in the end with great success, over the course of twenty-two years.

HISTORY BEGINS

Islam is quite obviously a biblical religion. But it is not such merely because echoes of biblical stories sound throughout the Muslims’ own sacred book, and certainly not because Muslims follow the Christian practice of reading the Jewish Bible, which they assuredly do not. Islam is biblical in a more profound sense: the theological premises of Islam, the very ontological ground from which it springs, find their first expression in the Hebrew Bible and in that same Book of Genesis that begins with Creation. The eleventh chapter of Genesis provides a broad prospect of cultural history—“Once upon a time all the world spoke a single language and used the same words”—which is followed by a detailed list of Noah’s descendants. The genealogy comes to an abrupt halt, however, and the book’s broad focus narrows down to the person of one Abram—later he will be called Abraham. From chapter 12 onward, the Bible is nothing else than the story of Abraham and his descendants or, more properly, the story of the playing out of a contract God made with the same Abraham and whose terms were to bind his descendants as well.

At the beginning of the twelfth chapter of Genesis, Abraham is living in Haran, in what is now southern Turkey, a recent migrant, along with his father and other relatives, from “Ur of the Chaldees.” Without prelude and with no indication of the circumstances, God tells Abraham to leave Haran, “your country, your kinsmen and your father’s house,” and to go to a land God will show him, where “I will make you a great nation” (Gen. 12:2).The details are still sparse, but in the country called Canaan, Abraham is told by God that this land will be his. Abraham “built an altar there to the Lord who appeared to him” (12:7), and a little later, in another place in that same land, “he built an altar to the Lord and invoked the Lord by name” (12:8). He was apparently not the only one there to do so. In chapter 15 of Genesis, what had before been a promise is ceremonially formalized into a covenant (berit), when God appears to Abraham “in a vision” (15:1)—a common form of divine communication in such circumstances. The Bible now explains: “Abram put his faith in the Lord and the Lord counted that faith as righteousness” (15:6). For his part, God spells out that Abraham, for all his and his wife’s advanced age, will have heirs, who will grow into a great people, and that these present nomads will possess a land of their own that will stretch “from the River of Egypt to the Great River, the river Euphrates” (15:18).

THE COVENANT AND THE COVENANTS

The Bible makes it perfectly clear that the Israelites, later called Jews, are the Chosen People, and why not, since they transcribed and preserved it. Why, then, do the Christians and Muslims think they are? First, recall that the Christians were themselves Jews, and that when they claimed they were Abraham’s heirs they were earmarking themselves, like other Jewish sects, as the one faithful remnant among God’s own. They were following Abraham in faith in their conviction that Jesus was the promised Messiah, an argument spelled out at some length in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. There were also plentiful suggestions scattered through the Bible that God was more than a little displeased with his people. There were even hints, like those dropped in Jeremiah 31, that the Covenant might be renegotiated, which is, the Christians claimed, exactly what happened. Finally, the Christians also maintained that this was a “new covenant” (Gk. nea diatheke; Lat. novum testamentum) for an eschatological moment in the history of Israel, one that justified the Gentiles’ (the goyim, or non-Jews) being drawn into “the Kingdom,” to use Jesus’ own preferred image for the End Time. Faith, then, was at the base of the Christians’ claim to the Covenant, faith in Jesus, and not mere obedience of the Law.

The Quran seems to have seen it quite differently. It knows a number of different divinely initiated covenants (ahd, mithaq) from Adam (20:115) onward through all the prophets; including Jesus and Muhammad (33:7). Though a covenant was made with the Christians (5:14)—there is no sign that it was “new” in any Christian sense of that word—it is the one made with Moses on Sinai that appears to have a special significance in the Quran. It is mentioned several times (e.g., 2:63, 93), and in one ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Discovering Scripture in Scripture
• 2. The Past Remembered
• 3. “And Muhammad Is His Messenger”
• 4. The Prince of Medina
• 5. The Muslim Scripture: The Quran
• 6. The Umma, Allah’s Commonwealth
• 7. God’s Way: A Life and a Law for Muslims
• 8. Defining and Defending the Community of Believers
• 9. The Worshipful Acts
• 10. This World and the Next