Islamic Origins

my name is Quinn Meachem I am a professor of political science and and the coordinator of the Middle East Studies program here at Brigham Young University this is the second in a series of lectures that we hope will continue for some time between Brigham Young University and the University of Utah where we are learning from one another and from the expertise that the faculty and these two institutions bring to the study of the Middle East and Middle Eastern history politics and religion it's my great privilege to welcome to BYU today Peter Van severs who is an associate professor of history at the University of Utah professor von severs is an expert in classical Islamic history and medieval and early modern Spain and medieval and modern North Africa in Islamic philosophy and science he's widely published in the fields of world history he has a number of book chapters and articles on topics such as Christology and prophet ology in the early you MyID Arab Empire the rise of Balkan nationalism within the triangle of the Ottoman Austrian and Russian empires 1800 1878 and has been quite involved in a number of questions regarding the early Islamic period which we get to hear about today his topic is on Islamic origins specifically thinking about the religious debates that were taking place in the Middle East around the the rise of Islam and the role of those debates in the development of the Islamic community and it's its earliest stages Islamic origins for those of you who are not familiar Islamic origins has become an interesting public and scholarly debate in recent years trying to understand the remarkable success of this world religion and where it came from what were the influences in early Islamic thought and professor von severs today is going to be this guessing some early work from a book manuscript that he is currently writing on those Islamic origins so please join me in welcoming professor von severs to BYU thank you crane for this very generous introduction that you have given and I'm very happy to be talking to you and talking also to many of you who probably don't have much of a background on Islamic Studies but you would see then in the course of the talk that quite a few things that I'm will be talking about are very relevant also for the contemporary understanding and particularly the conclusion I will address a few of these works I'm giving you a short outline and then I will repeat this outline as I'm going along so that you have a basic idea here that's this would probably sound look a bit intimidating but I am really focusing on only one point that I am pursuing in this book on which I'm working and that is concerned with trivialism which looms quite large in the in the Quran and in the debates of the 6th and early 7th centuries so let's see a quick overview and let me begin now professor meeting briefly alluded to this already Islamic origins have become very important in the last birth sort of 50 years or maybe even shorter than that because the research that has been carried out on these Islamic origins quite different from the traditional approach that was taken ever since the 19th century and the 19th century of course with the beginning of academic research of Judaism Christianity was a period where scholars usually secular in background we're looking at the origin of the religions of Judaism Christianity and eventually also Islam now in the case of Islam this has been handful for quite a bit because the even that is well known of course and also admitted by Muslims answers the Islamic sources date in general to 200 years after the first appearance of what we then later called Islam so that means that these sources are have or were written with the delay of a considerable amount of time which meant then that all kinds of religious points of view also various kinds of tribal competitions tribal boosting and the like were part of this Islamic tradition as it developed in 200 years later and we do not have really a good access to the original documents or the events that we would be looking at through these documents going back 200 years earlier so Orientalism which is then the field that engaged in the research on Islamic origins operated then according to the theory of as I call it here the onion peel theory meaning you peel away layer after layer so that eventually you arrive at the historical kernel that dominated the field until about 1980 and ended unfortunately now in retrospect in the disaster because you peeled and peeled and peeled and as we know onions don't have kernels and so there was nothing once you have taken had taken away all of the peers this that means there was a considerable crisis in Islamic studies which were accompanied also by an enormous amount of polemics people disputing each other disputing each other ability and the like which has taken place we are just barely coming out of this I've been always trying to avoid these kinds of controversy because of course they lead to nothing and do not help in the in the actual research but it's still going on particularly in Europe in Germany and in France in England there are vicious reviews of scholars of each other so it's a minefield it's a minefield of course also because what is happening in the Middle East right now is of course a resurgence of what one can call Islamic reform ISM in other words a form of Islam that was dominant maybe in the nine hundred thousand eleven hundreds but not thereafter and this kind of reform Islam emphasizes very strongly the historicity of this of the events of six hundred even though they are doubtful in in their actual occurrence so what scholars who have been now working during the last 50 years on Islamic origins are working with is the assumption of a context in which Muslims appeared in the course of the six hundreds and this context realism approach is the one that I'm also embracing so my own project is involved with the sources that were contemporary to the rise of Islam in the six hundreds which are mostly Christian in nature now the interesting phenomenon exists also that the Quran itself so the holy scripture of the Muslims can be dated actually to the six hundreds and recent carbon dating of some of these early manuscripts has even revealed the possibility that the Quran might have existed before the Quran so 580 instead of the 620 censored of now that with that as a background I would like to begin with this is not context realism the approach that we can understand the rise of Islam only if we really have a good understanding of what happened among the within the Christian denominations of the 500s and we are talking there about vicious attacks of Christians against each other the 500s weren't maybe quite as bad as see before hundreds but they were still pretty bad and you can see this in this particular title that I included by Philip Jenkins lengthy title but as I think a very descriptive one and I recommend this book very much to you so that you have an idea of what really went on before Christianity became what it actually was with lots of assassinations street riots people being deposed from their bishop breaks and so on so um with that in the background we need to understand that two councils katsudon 541 and the fifth equal Medical Council of Constantinople if 553 essentially set Christianity into its path which then was also important for the 600's when Islam emerged and we are talking there about the first of all the cat's Adomian Creed which then became constituent of the Christian denominations first of what we call Eastern Christianity but then also Catholicism and of course eventually put Protestantism and that does not play a major part certainly not in my top and also in historically in the evolution of early Islam so I'm not commenting much on this but I will be commenting on two churches that were considered from the point of view of considered so in other words from the Byzantine Emperor that determined that cuts we can't see Caledonian Creed which of course is basic for all Christian churches that that Creed should be the the Orthodox one so these two churches departed from it and were described therefore as heresies now as a good historical scholar who does not have any religious acts to for me these are not heresies these are just other expressions of Christianity so therefore I'm talking about Nestorian ISM one of the the forms of Christianity that existed that the assignment was driven out of the Byzantine or Eastern Roman Empire into the Persian Empire that was a great competitor during the 500s with the Roman Empire they were driven out because they allegedly preached to persons in the one Jesus Christ and how can that be Christianity if you have a fully humanity and the full divinity in this one person I will come back to this particular question but that was then the reason why the and there were of constant political machinations that accompanied this process of driving the historians out they reconstituted themselves in the Persian Empire where they formed a Christian minority because of course the Persians were of a completely different backgrounds Zoroastrianism interest for our purpose here the other main Christian Church at that time was up-and-coming and was actually fighting the the the main Church the imperially represented represented Church mightily if with all means I mean with all of the means that Jenkins also discuss with discusses here about mutual color of nations and so and so on the the this other church was set off the mono physics in Egypt and they had a special name as far as Syria was concerned where they were called the Jacobites now the founding father of the monophysites in general including then also the Jacobites in syria with severe oohs of antioch he was a bishop for a short time then he was deposed by the imperial church and then he was determined to establish a separate monophasic search hierarchy with the establishment of bishoprics particularly in syria so I will show you on a map then a little further on where exactly and he and then after his death to people particularly were him were appointed to see to it that this church was very represented in Syria in competition with the Roman Eastern Roman catatonia in church and so you have various places in Syria where you have double hierarchies competing with each other and of course fighting for the the believers in the various towns of where their representative whether we represented so I'm referring here to Theodore and Jacob barodius who were appointed as bishops and who then and that's now the important point yeah became active among the Arabs and as they unfolded the activity in the period after their appointment so 544 so in the five fifty sixty 70s when they converted many Imperial Caledonian Christians to monophysitism in Syria they penetrated actually then also into Arabia and quite a few then became oh no visits rather than Caledonia Christians so they converted from Caledonia Christianity to two to monophysitism to jack up is very important point here because we're not talking about any Arab pagans now however as this process of the formation of the motive is a textured in Syria took place there were there was a split within the quote heresy of the mono physical bites and that was the heresy of john philoponus who formulated this true theist quote heresy now here i have to be a little technical so i hope you can all follow me with the with with the thought process that defines now this truth ism for which john philoponus was important John is actually much better known as a great philosopher in the Alexandrian tradition we know a lot about his criticism about Aristotle and so he played a major part then later in the Middle Ages but he was also again an important theologian and he developed the following basic definition of Trinity which contradicts that of Katz Adomian katsudon and that is of course there is God the Father Jesus the Son and the spirit that proceeds either from the father and the son or from the father alone that's of course and a further division than within Christianity so this idea here our Father Son and spirit all representing manifestations or individuality so to speak of of the divinity was rejected by fell upon us and he instead proposed that each of the Trinity is its own God so there's God the Father Jesus the son but he is an a God by himself and then the Spirit whom John calls a comforter that is another not it not exactly person but certainly another entity so to speak why was that possible that such a redefinition of Trinity that contradicts actually the Nicene Creed which I briefly implied a few moments ago why was it possibly that that John did so and that is by philoponus this time so we are talking about the second half of the 500 the Aristotelian philosophy in which John was steeped very deeply is quite ambiguous as to what a substance is and so Aristotle actually says substance is really a primary substance so every one of us who's sitting here is a substance to him to herself or himself and that therefore then the nature today we would say the character or the character traits are personal to each of us or to each of the substance says that we represent that is certainly possible in an era so tea in interpretation but it would mean that what unites us so all of us can be considered members or individuals of humanity so we represent each individually what we can call the secondary substance of humanity so in other words humaneness is what is it read what is represented in all of us but there is in our contradiction in Arizona we could be interpreted either as being each of us a substance with our personal characteristics and traits which we would then call nature or we could say we are own members of your men humanity and our individuation z-- of this humanity but as individuation we are not persons we then still need in addition to be called whatever our names are with our personal characteristics and the like so this double definition of mud nature is plagues the entire five hundreds and is actually in terms of theological thought the background for all of these quarrels and and differences among the Christians in any event the the point that philoponus and made was in Trinity each of the three figures represents their own substance and so therefore what unites them is really only in name so in other words yes there's God the Father there's Jesus's son and there is a spirit and then sort of an in an abstract sense they have the common nature of quote divinity but even it it doesn't really exist it's only a figment of our imagination it's that Arizona says is actually quite explicitly explicitly in an Indiana MA so therefore they're only sort of vaguely in one's mind but not in reality United through the term Trinity but they are really all apart from each other that now was the heresy of truthly ISM that became rampant in Syria and I mentioned here on the bottom this is just in passing that I want to mention this the monks in Syria were now deeply split so the Jacobite mana physics were deeply split between regular monophysitism which was one of the so-called heresies and which relies on the actually on the only particular definition of what the nature of Jesus is I will not go into this is not necessary for our purposes here and then there are lots of monks in the same monasteries because monasteries dotted the landscape of Syria who professed this truth ISM so because of this split and probably there were furious discussions among these monks are the members of Trinity substances or are the members of Trinity just manifestations or aspects so to speak furious discussions we can assume in these in these monasteries and so the Archaea man writes as the documents referred to they were actually the abbot's of these monasteries were very concerned about these splits among their their monks in these monasteries and they wrote to their respective bishops hey puss what can we do in all of this and we unfortunately don't know the answer but that force must have been a situation of high anxiety toward the end of the 700s and so given this particular situation there was on top of that also then a schism in the Jacobite or mono physically with one of the bishops Damien of Alexandria whom who was accused by his opponent Peter of Kalina chrome Kalina come by the ways was at that time the name for raka that of course is the Eastern Syrian city that was recently reconquered from Isis if you want to locate this geographically I would show you a map in a moment so they accused each other these two bishops of horrible heresies rebellion ISM which is a much earlier heresy in the late to and it's early 300 according to which Jesus was not divine but merely a an adopted figure of high spiritual standing so he was accused of that particular heresy and then the important point Peter of colony members accused of truth is the factory was not the truth yes but that's not important truth he ISM continued right into the early 600 s went fine Lea then the schism was ended and three theism then probably faded from the scene but not quite and that's the whole point of my departure then for Islamic origins because you see the yeah one more point briefly because this this conflict between regular Jacobites or the Monophysite so-called heresy and then the split within the Jacobites represented by this truth is that then was visible among the arabs who were under a vice-regent a so-called file arc these were commanders in the name of prison of Byzantium or eastern Rome responsible for the defenses of the borders of the Roman Empire against the Persians and the desert border was therefore then the board of where the nomadic Arabs were enrolled as allies of the Byzantines in order to help protected and they were called the hasani's and you had the spelling here the hasanat file arc who was the leader of the Western Arabs the of one of them this jaffna al-hasan actually tried to end this schism among these bishops so that this whole truth he is episode would somehow be put aside or overcome so that regular monophysitism would recur return to to the land however jaffna was no longer very powerful and so he failed them in his efforts to to reconcile in this schism continued because by now power really had passed to other arabs whom I describe as Eastern Arabs and so let's go on let me quickly now show you on the map where what we are talking about here is the center of the province of Arabia that was where these Hasan EADS resided but they governed actually this entire area which we can call the Syrian step and desert let me show you now in the following map how far this asana need tear to be extended you can see a quite a bit into the direction of Baghdad and Mesopotamia and here now we will see the hasanat kingdom that was deputy to defend the eastern border of Rome against now Eastern Arabs who were deputed by the Persian king or king of kings chandra for the defense of Persia against Rome and they were the lack meets whom you see here as he adjacent territory so in the 500s the Romans and the Persians had already gone to war against each other several times generally the Romans were victorious but usually the luck meet they the Persians were able to come back and of course they used their their vice regions those of the sonnets and of the Lamas as allies to fight the war for them in in the desert here in the in the southern part of Syria so here roughly here and so now a few words about alarm it's the alarm it's now were the eastern part of the Eastern Arabs and in the the via cloud King or file arc in Iran it's converted in 594 to Nestorian Christianity now Nestorian Christianity is a Christian Church I mentioned this already briefly that believes in the to equal natures of Jesus so Jesus was equally human so he was fully human but he was also of course God because God in the interpretation of the theology of the 500s was also Jesus in in the sense that in in in terms of Trinity and how it was represented he represented God coming to earth in order to bring salvation to humans the by contrast the the amount of his IDEs believed in a primarily divine Jesus who took on the flesh of humans when he came to earth but was let's say three quarters divine 1/4 human so we can see here that was a real contrast over which you could go to war and could kill each other if it came really to blows and then on top of that you had the schism within this schism that there was somebody stood up and said and said well when we talk about Trinity we have to talk about three different gods so you can see the enormous amount of conflict that existed in Christianity now you convert it to Nestorian ISM and then one of the sources says once he had converted that he chased the Jacobites from the provinces so in other words only Nestorians now remained in the east among the eastern Arabs all the Jacobites all the more of his sites now were pushed back into hasanat territory or even further south into egypt and now the eastern Arabs had established their form of Christianity as dominant in this east and step now unfortunately however as it had so happened with the house on its but there it had happened already in 580 both the Roman Emperor and now also the Persian king in the early six hundreds decided that these vice regions in the desert who was the commanders of the Arabs to fight this supplementary war so to speak between the Romans and the Persians that they were expendable they had maybe grown a little too strong for their for their appointed positions and so I mentioned already the Rahsaan it's had been reduced around 580 now the Persian King went a step further he had his king who was supposed to defend the border against the Romans assassinated outright and so that was the end of the eastern Arabs in the city of Hira which is on the east on the western fringes of the Persian Empire and as I as I'm saying here now in the next outline well now in a moment the now leaderless the Eastern Christians Eastern Arabs dispersed into the desert but they became then powerful so that's the dynamic so to speak of Eastern versus western Arabs right around 602 and that's an important point of departure into which we'll go then in a moment the yeah as it so happened however just a few months after the Persian Shah had decided to murder his vice regent in the desert a usurper in constantly now provar through the Roman Emperor and focused the use of the Emperor then was the was a usurper against whom they shine cha ha ha stroll the second of the Persians went to war because he wanted to avenge the overthrow of the previous Emperor for the reason that he rostro had been hit already a few years earlier by the Roman Emperor to regain his throne there was a brief revolt in in Persia the Romans and the Persians always had hostility against each other but there were also periods of peace and so they they intermarried and so on and so it was not surprising that Ostrow declared himself now the avenger of the murdered roman emperor and went to war against the the usurper of course now he lacked a representative in the desert because just a few months earlier the Eastern Arabs had after the murder of their of taking a dispersed into the desert and so there was not much that he could do now as far as the desert zone in in terms of the war of the persians against the romans was concerned now the war well known no need now to go into the details we moved back and forth at one point the Persians conquered almost all of the Roman Empire they went as far as Egypt but then the war turned around miraculously under a new emperor heraclius who then turned the entire turned the tables and turned the entire situation around and eventually in 628 actually even advanced against the capital of the Persians so that was the end then of course ro and the end also of the Persian Empire because there was no clear successor in that particular situation now because the Arabs were among themselves in a way throughout this war period 602 to 628 because on either side were they needed or wanted there were among themselves so that's the important consideration that we have to think of now with the idea that the Eastern Arabs were a bit stronger than the Western Arabs but both were now in the Syrian desert and watch from afar how the biggies were killing each other so to speak the two empires and in then in 622 right when the war was beginning to turn in favor of the of the Eastern Romans they declared an Arab Kingdom 622 this is very important that this Arab kingdom was declared at that particular time because actually from the Islamic tradition so that the sources that are dated 200 years after the emergence of the the early Muslims 622 is which date the date of the Hydra the immigration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina and in Medina then the organization of the early Islamic community according to the Islamic tradition well now in the Christian sources of the period 622 is the date of the Declaration of the Arab Kingdom and accordingly then those Christian chroniclers of the period always then talked about what then happened with this Arab Kingdom so that's so let's get then to the this dark moment so to speak in the Syrian desert we know that Eastern Arabs dispersed made themselves dominant so probably the Western Arabs were subservient or at least they were being battled against or maybe there were conflicts or maybe there was also gradually emerging of the - we don't know so it would be pure speculation and as a good historian I'm not doing that particular saying I merely for is for purposes of illustration I want to show you yes there is a connection here between the Islamic sources of 200 years later and what the Christian chroniclers of the 600 say only it's being described a little differently instead of a Hydra of a prophet by the name of Mohammed migrating from Mecca to Medina we are talking about an Arab Kingdom emerging and right from the start these this Arab Kingdom according to one Christian chronicler consisted of two leaders and two sides and this is he perhaps the most important source here for the understanding of the beginning of Islam because we are talking about probably Western Christianized Arabs forming one side East Christian Arabs forming another side and each had a leader that corresponds to when Muhammad was in Medina with his efforts of of Muhammad's to return to Mecca and to convert Mecca from polytheism to monotheism and of course the Americans resisted and eventually their resistance was worn down to sides and to leaders because of course when Muhammad was in Medina there was a leader of these so-called pagan arabs in mecca abu sufyan who represents the other side so if this is indeed - then the Quran is actually very helpful I mentioned little earlier we now know that the Quran is truly dates truly to the six hundreds in which way it came about that it's a very mysterious from what I am saying here we have to assume that it came together as a scripture between 602 and sometimes toward the ends of the 600th and when I say 602 that's of course the time when the Eastern Christian Arabs dispersed in the Syrian desert note by the way that I'm not saying any anything about Mecca and Medina I'm see merely talking about the eastern and western carob Christians in the Syrian desert wherever there were now that gets us sent to the Quran which is a reliable source now for our further investigation and that is there is a curious term mushrikuna that appears about 19 times in the Quran and is usually translated as pagans and polytheists but in 1999 Jared hotting published a very important book hoarding is also among those who contextualize and seek to understand the beginnings of Islam in the wider context and he determined that these mushrikuna were actually Christians but that's where the book ends and we have to go much farther than those Christians and so therefore I wanted to include here now a few verses that give us an idea here how much further we can go indeed those who have believed and those who were Jews and Sabian's and the Christians Messara and the matrons and those who associate the truth so these are the mushrikuna Allah will judge between them on the Day of Resurrection indeed Allah is over all things and that's this particular Quranic verse now lived a bit later and who can be related to that particular Quranic verse because in his writing which is accessible through the Madrid is composition modulus he says the following as for the monotheists to whose monotheism the Quran testifies whom we recognize to be confessing that God is one they are they the God is one they are as we ourselves sorry that is the Nestorians the Jacobites and the Melkite samara kites are the Caledonians and that is a particular term that was being used at that time for the imperial christians meaning those under the king so and and and those of the Christians who follow our way as for the polytheists a mushrik oon among them they are the people who imitate Christianity like the mosque unites the Dicer nights and Manicheans and the truth is they also have the Arabic term those who posit three and others who trace their origins to Christianity but who are devoid of Christianity and far removed from it so in other words the three theists are Christian heresy from the point of view of the historians and they are other Christians who are pretending to be Christians but they are not truly Jacobite malachite or historian now just so that you know that when he used when Shania uses say the term truth is a trainer Lucia he means that not the term that are already in the fifth century was available among Arabs in Arabic the the term Trinity this would be the Arabic that term is not being used and so therefore this testimony by Shania is so important so let me now show you what then the quran has to say about these three years o people of the scripture do not commit excess in your religion or say about Allah except the truth the Messiah Jesus the Son of Mary was but a Messenger of Allah and His Word which he directed to Mary and a soul created at a command so it's the Immaculate Conception of course of of Jesus from him so believe in Allah and his messages and do not say three the exists it is better for you etc another verse they have certainly disbelieved who say Allah is the third of three so neither of these verses speaks of Trinity but just of three therefore then and here I'm saying that the unity does not appear so we can't assume coming out to the conclusion that what the quran says in in its own testimony about these true theists who emerged in the 500s and causes split among the Jacobites or the moan of his eyes that was a particular predominant form of Christianity among the Western Arabs whether they were the majority or whether mono physics in general so those that did not split up a split from the the run-of-the-mill monophysitism that Severus had created but belonged to the smaller and more specific truth he is sick we do not know probably the assumption would be that the majority were more of his I'd of the Western Arabs but there was a minority and these were clearly other ones against which the Quran Palama sizes and that's very important because the Quran is actually very friendly towards both jacoub ISM monophysitism and nestorianism and in fact in many ways comes out of of nestorianism so it denies that is very expressed in the Quran that Jesus is the Son of God instead he's always the servant or the like all other prophets of God but as I tried to emphasize here throughout my presentation first of all these mushrooms were not pagans they were Christians they were either Western Jacobite or Eastern historian and they are generally being treated very gently in the Koran because their verses of convergence so in other words we hear in the Quran always want to emphasize emphasize what we have common with mainstream Christianity be at modified or Nestorian yes there then also diverge verses of divergence particularly those that emphasize the the servant ship of Jesus but then for the rest of Libra and if you read it very carefully you come you come across Mary's Immaculate Conception so Mary conceived Jesus through the Spirit through their Word of God also the spirit this is a variation that is a little more complicated but can also be explained so mainstream Christianity that's for how all Christians interpreted the the Gospels that even though Jesus Joseph was the father the conception of Jesus was actually through the Word of God Jesus has me right and a miracle powers that's emphasized throughout all the verses that appear in the Quran about Jesus and Jesus if you read carefully also dies on the cross and is or is resurrected even though those verses just intimated I mean you cannot really interpret it but and clearly some work has took place there to take that away from Jesus but the Ascension is directly expressed Jesus rolls to the right of the Heavenly Father so my one of my conclusions and is this particular attitude that the Quran has to what Christianity as a whole as opposed to trivias who are the real bad guys so to speak of the Quran the ones who talk about the three gods of Trinity regular either more of a site or method or Nestorian Christianity is being treated in a very friendly way but always with a view that Jesus was actually the one who announced someone who would come after him him if you go to John there are these famous verses of the Paraclete which in the ground then later in the Islamic tradition are being interpreted as yes there Jesus announced someone who would come there after and that is Muhammad Muhammad is actually not really a name it's it literally means the praised one and is probably therefore then the notation so to speak for that particular sage scribe or other person who worked on the various parts that eventually came together and made up the Quran the whole is the scripture of the of the Muslims participating in a collective scholarly reworking so to speak of all Christian traditions in order to come up with this notion that Muhammad is really the last prophet and not Jesus with that I thank you for listening to me and I will be happy also to engage you in discussion I [Applause] thank you very much professor on servers we do have about 12 minutes for questions we're going to be finishing up at 4:00 if you need to leave before they're Q&A you're welcome to do that for those who would like to stay professor on servers has graciously agreed to take some questions what I'd ask you to do if you have a question is just to raise your hand I will bring you this mic please introduce yourself your name and your major and then you can raise your question so question right here yes and again we'll go until 4:00 p.m. so that oh sorry my name is Mariah Dean I'm my majors history I'm from Brazil but I I was thinking that in the Quran he says that Jesus like the Mary Jesus was conceived by like gods the word the white okay so how do they explain that God is not the father of Jesus who is the father of Jesus for them yeah for for understanding Christianity Judaism for that matters were and Islam you have to be aware that one of the cardinal points of all of the debates that were often of course quite bloody as I mentioned of all of the debates it was always very important but God the Father let's put the parentheses for a moment it's transcendent transcendence means you can say nothing about him he simply removed from anything sensory so even though he reveals himself there's nothing you can say about him and that has to be protected so theologians always had to be very careful when they said Jesus when they argued that Jesus that God had a son and Trinity because how is that possible that this son son now who is God comes to earth and has this double in nature so to speak because doesn't that drag the transcendent God into eminence and make him dirty so to speak I mean make him part of this corrupt world because that was of course always the assumption behind all behind this this effort to protect the transcendence of God a sort of resurfaced in the formation of Islam and so therefore then district denial that God can engender sons but also now and when you look at the vocabulary violent means a carnal son even it's much more abstract the word which means son of course in Arabic voilá means child that could mean that well it might be even compatible with this AB with his servant function so in other words the the concern to protect the transcendence of God on one hand but also to fully explain Jesus Christ after all in the Gospels he comes across as a person with one nature one character one number of traits that you can describe very well you can preach of course every Sunday on various aspects of the life of Jesus that he nevertheless was divine what that was precisely than the problem where everybody diverged did I come anywhere close to you with my answer okay yeah hi my name is Jorge Garcia I'm studying international relations with a focus on Latin America but I have been thinking a lot about how religion is taught in public or in public educate our education especially in K through 12 and I was wondering I know this isn't exactly your field or what you're studying but what would you say is the best way to teach Islam in a way that wouldn't offend or scare off Christians or make them feel threatened about the religion if that makes sense yeah or the other way around how can you sit down with a fundamentalist or reformist Muslim and explain Christianity to it to this person I'm very grateful that you raised this point because you can of course ask yourself okay now you have heard a more-or-less learn it presentation here about the the conflicts among the Christians since the 500 what severe events all of this what do you take away from that apart from this being just I hope solid scholarship there is a point and that is remember I mentioned this idea here of convergence so in other words if you know about these Christian roots that Islam has Islam did not emerge Sooey generous out of the revelations that Mohammed received on a mountain near Mecca which incidentally is called Hara so there is he a remembrance of this particular term because that's of course the name of the Eastern Arab Christian city of Hira in Mesopotamia anyway it's of immediate relevance because if you emphasize to Muslims look if you are willing I will lead you to an understanding of the Quran but forget for a moment the tradition that is was formulated 200 years later okay we know about Muhammad for example only because a biography was written 200 years later the word Muhammad appears only three times as such as Muhammad in in the Quran so we do not even know who revealed the Quran for all we know is that of what we talk about at the as the revelation of the Quran was the communal work of scribes who were deeply steeped in all of the scriptures of Christianity including all three all the nanka non-kinetic non canonical ones of previous centuries and put together of what we can maybe call a concordance of all of the Christian writings this is the original meaning of this lamb by the way so the whole point here is if it is possible to so let me first answer the question of you and me sitting down with a Salafi or even jihadi Muslim I mean jihadi just before he engages in your heart obviously Muslim and you can somehow sit down and be patient with each other then you and I would say look now there are Christian roots and these roots furthermore appear in the Quran in most mostly convergent form so that there is actually a lot of commonality between Christianity and Islam and if you are willing then we count you Muslims among those who inherited the common concordance heritage of Judaism and Christianity even though Christianity within itself was of course deeply conflicted as I pointed out so we are heirs of all three things and so the Muslim the Islamic Quranic revelation is therefore just another version of the revelatory tradition that comes out of the Middle East now let's turn it also around of course since the you originally asked the question from the other side and that is how can how can we could you reformulate it so that I can be precise with my with Manton how could we put this how could we help Christians see the humanity in Islam yeah walked out like threatening their own sense of identity and Christianity yeah so that would be then we among ourselves with is any Muslim present I I looked around earlier and didn't think that was what but I mean obviously I'm not saying anything offensive but I merely want to be very sensitive in my answer and that is we among ourselves should draw away from the multiple prejudices that we have about Islam and they of course countless I'm not even mentioning now the ones that are that populated the Middle Ages I'm talking only about let's say contemporary ones and among these prejudices are number one these orientalists who peel these onion peels away think that Islam and the rise of Islam has to be explained primarily out of these Islamic sources but that has run its course now we cannot use the Islamic tradition anymore be the example the the Mohammed biography the so called Sierra s IRA it was composed in eight or the the final version a twenty three so you see the two hundred years that I was talking about there is four that is for the first time the source where we then learn about Muhammad was born in 570 II grew up in Mecca he has his first revelations in 610 and so on and so forth among ourselves if we open ourselves to what the Christians had to say about the rise of Islam in the six hundreds like I did here in my presentation then we would come to the conclusion by the origins of his can be nicely compared to what Christianity was all about in the 500s and all of the problems that experienced you see them continued here in the origins of Islam this will open up open us up to a view of late antiquity that is much larger than just these few years of the early six hundreds when between 610 where the first revelations came and 632 when the Prophet Muhammad according to Islamic tradition died which is a very narrow focus on the origins of Islam so of course you can retell the story of Muhammad a thousand times and I do this actually in my history survey classes but then of course a week later I say okay what you have just now learned is not history but religion ok the religious interpretation of what how Muslims viewed the rise of Islam now let me tell you what the Christians had to say when these origins of Islam occurred so in short if you give up this orientalist approach this notion that through philology you can clarify these Islamic sources and through all of these traditions that are biased and have certain religious points of views you can come to some sort of historical background or origin it won't work what we work however is a historical context that you established where you have then a much much better knowledge certainly of Christianity in late antiquity and particularly this curious people called true theists who usually by the way Orientalists dismissed them as just minor people who were discussing every Fineman of theological approaches to the problems of Krishna Christology and theology these these were people over which first of all these were doctrines over which people kill each other number one as Jade said but then furthermore this was a real white spray among monks of Syria where Islam probably originated amongst of Syria where lots of monks were Twitter's and we're probably lots of Arabs were truth is otherwise why would there be this battle against the mushrikuna who were the alleged associated so in short what I'm saying is taking the traditional orientalist approach talking now only among ourselves not not non-muslims although Muslims in a way I should listen in so to speak as as people who take in what happened in the among Christians in the 500 we are taking this much wider contextual approach of well that's what happened in Christianity and that had such and such effects on the Arabs who were in this border region between the two empires and who were exposed already to the full blast of all of these different Christianity's and who worked out this conflict among themselves you see that's the important point because of course the the big Christian Church then subsequently I assume we all know this of course there is still today the Coptic Church of Egypt that is more or visiting there a mano physically site Christians and Egypt are very defensive against Catholicism against Greek orthodoxy Greek orthodoxy Catholicism Protestantism and then further 19th century developments in proving that also Mormonism they all follow this cat Cydonia tradition about which I didn't say much and then they are the historians who are the knee neglected Christians they are actually the Christians who then when eventually the Romans this sorry when the Muslims destroyed the the Persian Empire were represented all along the so-called Silk Road so Christians today in China are very likely to be in historians so the Nestorian community is very small it has suffered under the ISIS takeover of parts of Iraq because the the representatives of Isis were very anti-christian and the predominant number of Christians in in Iraq are the Nestorians or the descendants of the nastasi so-called Eastern Church so what I'm saying here is the the larger perspective that I'm recommending gives us has much better understanding of what Islam is all about thank you very much if you could join me once again in thanking professor on Seavers for his visit that would be great [Applause] you

Channel: BYU Kennedy Center

Views: 56,160

Rating: 4.3344769 out of 5

Keywords: BYU, Brigham Young University, Kennedy Center, International Studies, International Relations, Political Science, Education, Lecture, Middle Eastern Studies

Id: 6__C7Wu8qV4

Length: 62min 42sec (3762 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 21 2017