Scriptural Links: Judaism, Christianity and Islam (Understanding Islam Series: Session 3)

so they're more alert I slowly let the heat or soft be heat woman well that and after up the Hakeem's Arabic lecture yesterday I'm sure you know exactly what that means slight revision of what I was saying yesterday I mislead you by suggesting that I was going to continue the track that I've mapped out on this hadith of Gabriel Islam Eman and F then in fact consulting as I very occasionally do that the the menu for today's activities I see that I'm actually slated to talk about scriptural links between Islam Judaism and Christianity so in order not to upset the smooth unfolding of the the curriculum here I shall indeed speak on that so I'll be talking about Islam as part of a wider family of faiths not about Islam as it exists within itself which is what I was holding forth on yesterday but Islam as it has interacted with others and perhaps the best point to start with is the not sufficiently appreciated fact that while pundits of popular culture and often quite educated people as well tend to have this image of Islam as the quintessential other that civilization that package of religious beliefs and values which is the most alien to Western people and the least comprehensible whereas in fact Islam is the closest of all religions to Christianity it's closer even than is Judaism you could say that the world's religions divide very crudely and broadly into three categories these three that he'll sometimes the comparative religion is trot out animism of course represents the belief of primordial tribal communities the idea that the divine exists or in here's in rocks trees and so forth in the form of spirits and that animism or shamanism would be this first category of the world's religions secondly the monistic religion which are those which don't believe in a personal God but in an impersonal force a being which is constantly engendering the world and calling it and the individual souls therein back towards itself so that the second category includes states like Hinduism Buddhism Taoism and perhaps one or two others thirdly there are the theism z-- ie those that believe in a personal God they believe that the world was created in time and that it will come to an end the creator is in some sense a personal deity approachable through prayer and through worship and the creator reveals the divine nature through sending scriptures mediated by prophetic figures now Islam is part and parcel of this third family this theistic family of religions they are sometimes referred to as the Abrahamic religions since they all recognize the Prophet Abraham as their common patriarch and identify very strongly with his rejection of idolatry and his quest for the one true God so we have here a shallow cultural archetype which is wrong in quite an interesting way Aslam is not the other in fact it's a Western religion obviously originated in the Middle East but then so did Judaism and Christianity in my final lecture next week I'll be attempting some thoughts about the relationship between Islam and the West particularly in the 20th century today however I intend to look more closely at what Islam shares and perhaps what it doesn't share with it too great predecessors now the simplest way of doing this is by comparing the Islamic account of salvation history with that of Christianity and Judaism and the most striking initial point is that Islam's view of history is actually a lot closer to that of Judaism than to that of traditionally held by most Christians Judaism sees history as an evolving saga of human distraction rectified by periodic divine prophetic interventions sometimes angry sometimes rather wistful Islam more or less shares this perspective it only disagrees with Judaism in a few respects which I'll now attempt a list firstly Islam very emphatically prefers the style of Jewish religion proclaimed by the great annunciator II prophet of the Old Testament such as Isaiah and Jeremiah with their thundering yet ultimately compassionate awareness of the subtlety of sin in the human soul and it prefers this style of Jewishness to the complexities of rabbinical Judaism as this was worked out in the Second Temple period and essentially brought to its modern orthodox form with the codification of the Babylonian Talmud in the late 1st and early 2nd centuries of the Common Era however there is a distinction Muslims regard the rabbinical form of Judaism simply as too difficult and unnecessary complication of the simple yet nonetheless law inspired prophetic ideas of the Old Testament prophet and so we find that it's La McClure the Sharia is in fact while in some ways clearly a continuation and an affirmation of Jewish law nonetheless simplifies it very much ameliorates it the most obvious case of this is for instance the laws on purity a lot easier in in Islam than in Judaism if you look at Jacob noisiness translation of the books on on purity from from the Talmud you'll see there are several volumes just on how to keep yourself clean in the books of Islamic law it's at most a few pages depending on on the scale of the commentary similarly there's an amelioration and a simplification of the dietary laws Jewish dietary law is very difficult there's the obligation for instance to keep milk foods apart from meat etc that prohibition has not been continued in Islam there is the the kosher regulation in that animals have to be slaughtered in the kosher fashion drained as much as as feasible of the blood nonetheless generally speaking Islamic dietary law is a good deal easier than Jewish law so you'll find in schools for instance Muslim kids will have less difficulty at lunchtime then will Orthodox Jewish children similarly in Islam the Sabbath laws are more or less done away with Islam doesn't actually recognize a day of rest in the traditional Jewish or Christian sense there is the Friday prayer and Friday in most Muslim countries is a public holiday nonetheless people can work there and there's no complex web of prohibitions and what you can and can't do on that day second major point is that Islam has drastically modified Jewish patterns of fasting the traditional Orthodox Jewish fast is 24 hours that Yom Kippur fast being the most conspicuous example there Muslim fasts as I explained yesterday and as perhaps you'll be trying tomorrow extends from first light until sundown thirdly the question of the Covenant Islam holds that God's covenant has been extended beyond the people of Israel to cover a truly multinational universal religious family in which genetics inheritance is irrelevant so what the Quran refers to as the Omar an important term you can omit the final H if you choose this means that the family of all Muslims the community of Muslims and it has no ethnic connotations whatsoever and Islam self perception is that previous episodes of prophecy whether in the Semitic tradition or in others which are not mentioned by the Quran were specific to particular human groups so we find a hadith saying at the Prophet saying every prophet before me was sent only to his own people but I was sent to all mankind and another illustration of this is a famous hadith in which we learned that on the day of judgment every prophet will intercede for his own community Moses will intercede for the Jews Jesus will intercede for believing Christians and so forth but Muhammad will intercede not only for the sinners in his own community but for sinners in other religious groups as well now this idea clearly sets Islam at a considerable distance from traditional Jewish ideas of chosen people in fact Islam has theologically been unable to accept such an idea at least in it Orthodox Jewish formulation because it seems to impune the ethical nature of God if one people is chosen that seems to imply that other peoples are rejected or a seen as less deserving of the divine intervention and that is some not in keeping with the Quranic ideal the fourth great difference between Islam and Judaism is of course and this is the most difficult one when it comes to dialogue the acknowledgment of post Old Testament prophecy Orthodox Judaism does not accept that Jesus and Muhammad were authentic messengers of God in fact there are rights in Orthodox Judaism for the ritual cursing at both of these prophets recently in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba for instance in occupied Palestine and the rabbi's held a ritual cursing of the Prophet Muhammad which was reported in the British press and this is there in the Babylonian Talmud and the formulas for it are established similarly the Babylonian Talmud in a lengthy passage lists the alleged sexual perversions of Jesus and says that his punishment in the next life will be to be immersed forever in boiling excrement interestingly though the halaqa the Jewish law differentiates between Jesus and Muhammad Jesus is in fact regarded as a worse offender the Talmudic commentators universally state that Jesus was executed justly by a properly constituted rabbinical court for his blasphemy medieval Judaism also held that the doctrines of Trinity and the Incarnation were monstrous compromises with the Old Testament ideal of the one single God hear o Israel thy Lord my God is one hence for instance we find again in the the halaqaat the Jewish legal literature the great Maimonides the greatest exponent of Jewish law in the medieval period saying that if the Jew fears persecution by Muslims he can pretend to be a Muslim to escape that persecution that's permissible but if he fears persecution by Christians he cannot pretend to be a Christian because Christianity is a compromise with monotheism whereas Islam is not similarly the halaqa discussion of kosher wine also illustrate at this point the the rabbi's argue as to what one should do with a bottle of wine that one finds has been opened and they conclude that if it has been handled by a Christian it has to be poured away if it's been handled by a Muslim it can be sold although it can't be consumed by Jews and this is a consistent assumption that runs through medieval Jewish law although obviously much of this has been been reformed by contemporary Judaism and this should not be regarded as some kind of judgment on on Judaism as a religion but it's there in the medieval texts and I cited to illustrate this distinction that Judaism traditionally made between Christianity and Islam and now this relatively positive attitude or comparatively positive attitude towards Islam as compared to Christianity probably also reflects the social conditions of the Jewish experience of life in the medieval period under followers of Islam and Christianity Christianity until living memory included in its official doctrinal formulations the principle that the Jews were collectively responsible for the death of Christ the Vatican only formally abandoned this position just twenty years ago and the gospel texts particularly the Gospel of John and also the letters of Paul accused the Jews collectively of murdering God Himself of deicide a German New Testament scholar called unglued Amnon has recently published an in-depth study of this I'm a book called the unholy in Holy Scripture and it confirms the general all they're very shame faced realization that 2000 years of quite hideous European anti-semitism has roots in the New Testament itself he quotes for instance just to take one example from Paul's First Epistle to the Thessalonians chapter 2 verses 14 to 16 for you brothers became imitators of the Churches of God in Jesus Christ which are in Judea for you suffered the same things from your own countrymen as they did from the Jews who killed both the Lord Jesus and the prophets and drove us out and displease God and oppose all men but God's wrath has come upon them at last and Paul's attack here on the Jews for having killed God himself is here simply drawing on the anisette anti-semitism which is prominent particularly in acts and in the Gospels themselves recently a British Bishop human turd fury of Birmingham who's himself from a family of converts from Judaism caused a controversy when he said that the Gospels are anti-semitic documents and certain portions of them should not any longer be read in churches and he cites for instance their passage in Mark's Gospel where we have the parable of the wicked husband men the owner of a vineyard in this case an allegory for God sends his son to admonish his misbehaving tenants but according to Mark those tenants said to one another this is the heir come let us kill him and the inheritance will be ours and they took him and killed him and cast him out of the vineyard what will the owner of the vineyard do he will come and destroy the tenants and give the vineyard to others have you not read this scripture the stone which the builders rejected is become the head of the corner this is mark 12 verses 7 to 10 and this allegory composed perhaps some 30 40 years after Jesus's trial is very clear it is the Jews that have killed God's Son and hence they will be utterly destroyed and their land given to Gentiles and the stone that was rejected it's quite a popular Church sermon image for Jesus even today so this central scriptural assumption that the Jews killed Christ determined Christianity's attitude to the Jews for two millennia they were mistreated that's a very complex issue about then you know this position of official a consensus was handed a New Testament and while I don't want to get into analysis legal injury in the drug flora lecturer its final amount accident then it's complex but increasingly I think that the theological consensus has been moving in favor of the acknowledgement that traditional Christian anti-semitism has justified itself with reference to the Gospels and sub-sub Paul does John Stossel consistent uses the expression for you I agree and its traditional translated as the Jews but there's increasingly scholarly opinion that before you dive away and read and also translated as that you being a party which represents the set of leaders the word of satis Ian and temp oriented and to in any ways of those Jesus as they both other Jewish leader super mounting the popular revolutionary movements that are upsetting their stance especially from yeah I'd be happy to accept that I'm MIT because I'm not a New Testament person I'm mouthing the opinions of most of my colleagues at the department of theology where this issue is very deeply and sincerely discussed we have for instance a complete paper in the department on Christian responses to the Holocaust which goes into this question of the possible anti-semitism in the New Testament and I'm not sure that we have to come down on one side of the discussion or the other what I'm trying to say is that traditionally the Jewish experience of Christianity was a pretty negative one which accounts for that's right tell their tendencies toward hostility to jews precisely all these assessment documents but i think a lot of times they were fun on the streets of his documents or because of the answers many flavoured christianity it used these documents invalidly to support their innocent Romanticism now i'm not trying to say that these documents are in electively anti-semitic I'm merely saying that the Christian tradition overwhelmingly down the centuries has read them as such so I should perhaps um rewrite this and make it a little bit more nuanced in future I cite all of this in order to explain why there has been such rabbinical mistrust of Christian people for the centuries the Jews were mistreated on the basis of this reading of the New Testament Islam however proceeded on a very different kind of founding narrative the Quran records conflicts sometimes quite sharp ones between the early Muslims and individual Jews and Jewish tribes and there is a Quranic polemic against Judaism however the distinction is that the Jews are not singled out as some kind of uniquely malevolent force in history similarly the Quran does not accused them of the crucifixion of Jesus or of deicide for Muslim theology the Jews have not killed God since God is not and never has been incarnate so for most of Muslim history we find that the Muslim world was in fact relatively benign and tolerant towards Jews the Christian Byzantine Empire had actually prohibited Jews from living in Jerusalem as soon as the Muslim armies captured Jerusalem a proclamation which issued and Jews could return and live there in peace so it's been estimated that as many as nine-tenths of medieval jewelry actually lived in the world of Islam blood libels and pogroms of a type normal in Europe were actually effectively unknown in the Muslim world Jews could rise to senior administrative positions Maimonides himself for instance became the personal physician of the great Saladin and as Samuel tyne has said compared to christian europe the lands of Islam were a paradise for the Jewish people and recently I came across an interesting illustration of this in my visit to Bosnia there is a Bosnian Jewish community sadly decimated during the Holocaust but there's still a few thousand of them there and they're their family language is actually Ladino which is a kind of Spanish and there's a pardek Jews who after the Reconquista of Muslim Spain in 1492 chose to emigrate to other Muslim countries rather than live under rule of the the Catholic Monarchs and for 500 years they've retained this very Spanish aspect of their culture and in fact when the Ottomans conquered Constantinople they sent rabbis out to Germany and other parts of Europe inviting Jews to come and settle in Constantinople to live there and to support the the economic and demographic growth that the Ottomans wish to see that now this is a very encouraging example of medieval tolerance and even symbiosis and I think when we contemplate the frankly quite dismal misunderstandings that exists between Jews and Muslims today it's very important that we be aware of it and bear it in mind since 1948 this symbiosis and this even empathy has suffered immeasurably because of the creation of the State of Israel from 1948 there has been a forced expulsion of the mainly Muslim Palestinian population from their homes and a continued Israeli population policy of constructing Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land and this understandably makes it very difficult for modern Muslims to look with the old equanimity on the Jewish people Zionism has in practice tended to be resolutely hostile to the non-jewish populations it conquers for instance a booklet published by the central region command of the Israeli army explains quote under no circumstances should an Arab be trusted even if he makes an impression of being civilized in war when our forces stormed the enemy they are allowed and even enjoyed even enjoined by the halacha Jewish law to kill even good civilians that's not the view of some extremists that's there in a document published by a unit of the Israeli army and the current Oslo agreement which has actually accelerated Israeli settlement building and precipitated a rapid upturn in the death rate on both sides has already made matters even worse so the situation in dialogue between Muslims and Jews is a very fraught one in fact there are very few context at least in Britain where there is serious dialogue taking place anyway so much for the historical background the message is quite simple despite superficial complexities recent hostility among Muslims is the result of political circumstances not the result of any fundamental clash in doctrine Jews and Muslims in their understanding of God and in methods for achieving salvation actually more or less speak the same language and historically the coexistence of Muslims and Jews is one of the most encouraging examples of religious toleration what I want to do now is to look at the basis for this successful although albeit sadly forgotten coexistence namely the scriptural overlap between the Hebrew Bible and the Quran this obviously recalls and includes an important overlap between Islam and Christianity as well of the 26 or so prophets mentioned in the Quran all but five appear in the Hebrew Bible as well so that's a major overlap the remainder are Arabian prophets for example the prophethood hud-1 of the Quranic prophets who were sent to the people of ad ad in what is now South Yemen and in fact the annual festival of the prophethood is one of the biggest annual events in South Yemen his tomb is known visited part and parcel of of the Islamic view of prophetic history the people of odd the Quran explains rejected his message persisted in their vice and idolatry and so God destroyed them with a roaring wind this is 0:41 verse 15 there's no trace of this in fact of any non-jewish prophet in the Bible but in fact is fact not not so significant because the tails of these Arab prophets that we find in the Koran and the divine response to them are not in fact categorically different to the stories that are told of the Hebrew prophets in the Bible all that is unfamiliar simply is the idea that a prophet doesn't have to be a Jew and this is of course cited in the Quran as a prop to Muhammad's claim to prophecy he himself was also reproached by Jewish communities used in contact with for not being a Hebrew um so these Arabian prophets appear in the Quran partly to support the Prophet Prophet Muhammad's own claim in the same light I think we can appreciate that the Muhammad's own self understanding as a prophet really is very similar perhaps even identical to that of the biblical prophets the criteria by which a man is regarded as a prophet in the Old Testament also apply fully to the Prophet Muhammad this is by the way one of the most familiar complaints that Muslims make when they are in dialogue with Jews or Christians what on what basis for instance does one consider Jeremiah to be a true prophet of God but does not extend the same status to Muhammad what did the one have that the other left so the Muslim image of a prophet is not significantly different to the Christian or the Jewish one but does this mean that the stories of the prophets that we find in the Quran are identical to the equivalent narratives in the Bible well in some cases we can say yes to that question for instance in due course we'll have a lecture here on zero twelve of the Quran which is entirely dedicated to the Prophet Joseph and there are a few minor details which appear differently but effectively it's it's a reiteration of the picture so beautifully portrayed in Genesis there is one difference however which is a significant one in Genesis Genesis it seems that Joseph is actually tempted by Potiphar's wife where's the Quran seems to insane that he was not this is because the Quranic idea of prophecy insists that a prophet to be deserving of the mission with which God entrusts him has to be masam that is divinely secured from major sin mouthal means inerrant impeccable so this is really the significant difference that one can locate between the Old Testament view of prophecy and the Quranic one the only significant one the Old Testament prophet can sin and repent that's part of their greatness the Quranic prophets are infallible other examples for instance the story of Job felt very briefly in the Quran this is sure of for home verse 163 also 0 38 verses 42 44 doesn't suggest that his affliction was in any way merited because of what he'd done but merely that it was a trial from God which he bore patiently has no further significance other cases include the notorious instance incident of David and Bathsheba I just read you the biblical account this is 2 Samuel chapter 11 verses 2 to 4 and it came to pass upon an even tide that David arose from off his bed and walked upon the roof of the king's house and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself and the woman was very beautiful to look upon and David sent and inquired after the woman and one said is not this Bathsheba the daughter of Eliam the wife of Uriah the Hittite and David sent messengers and took her and she came in unto Him and he lay with her now there was no way this story could form part of the Quranic idea of what a prophet is supposed to be in the quran view a prophet can't steal another man's wife so we find the story simply censored out it's not there in the Quran not very in the hadith and forms no part of the Muslim image of David who is regarded instead as a perfected human being other incidents from the life of David also pop up in scattered passages of the Quran which are familiar for instance David killed Goliath became a king who received both knowledge and wisdom from God and the ability to do justice God gives him a scripture there's a board and I'll write this up hence is one of the great prophets who actually receive written revelation and whether this can actually be identified with the present day Psalms is something that Muslims theologians haven't agreed on David has the ability to make the birds and the mountains his servant so that the unite in his praise God also teaches him how to fashion chain mail out of iron in the hadith and in subsequent Muslim legend which often drew on midrashic and other Jewish material to create a sort of luxuriant legendary material around the bare bones of the story sketched by the Quran we find other ideas we're told that David had this miraculous ability to sing the Psalms in a beautiful voice so that he was able through singing them to tame passions not just of human beings but also of animals and even inanimate objects so that's a brief thumbnail sketch of Islam's take on the Prophet David much more significant however for the quran's purposes is its narrative of the great prophet Moses known to Muslims as Moosa the Quran frames its narrative with a polemical point in view namely to show the very close parallels between the Ministry of Moses and that of Muhammad in States explicitly for instance the two shared the same doctrine caesura 43 verse 11 like Muhammad Musa is accused of being a magician by the idolaters like him also he has been given a book in Moses case this is that their Torah in which as the Quran says there is illumination and guidance that's the Quran description of of the Pentateuch the biography of Moses in the Quran more or less follows the exodus account although as always it's told only in summary you have to remember that the Quran is not a history book it's not the heroic narrative of people like the Hebrew Bible it invokes earlier prophets but only in a summary way in order to make a particular point is not interested in merely supplying historical facts so in the Koran we find narratives about the infant Moses and how he was cast into the River Nile and miraculously a member of Pharaoh's family finds him and raises him as a youth he accidentally kills an Egyptian and has to flee and in the desert of Midian we find him watering the flock of an elderly man sometimes identified with the Prophet Jethro he marries one of his daughters and serves him for 10 years he then encounters the burning bush and hears a voice commanding him to go back to Pharaoh and the voice confers upon him the ability to work two miracles turning the staff into the Serpent and his hand turning two to light so he does this and he confounds the magicians at Pharaoh's court and they recognize his prophethood and Pharaoh has them crucified then Pharaoh declares himself to be divine orders the construction of a high tower from which he can says look out over the god of Moses and God punishes him by granting further empowering miracles to Moses then we get a brief sketch of the Exodus and the drowning of Pharaoh and his hosts in the Red Sea Moses spends 40 nights on Sinai bringing back the tablet and today you can visit Mount Sinai I think one or two have actually done that amongst you and at the top you'll find a little church and a little mosque happily sitting side by side but Israelites of course have built the golden calf and they're punished by having to wander for 40 years in the wilderness so all of this is more or less familiar from the biblical account the corn isn't really saying anything massively new here but there are minor revealing differences for instance the infant Moses is rescued not by Pharaoh's daughter but by Pharaoh's wife whose name is hacia and in a famous hadith the Prophet praised hacia as one of the four women the four supreme saintly women who've been given perfection by God ASEA there's even a hadith in which the Prophet says that a wife who is mistreated by her husband will be rewarded by God on the day of judgement with the same reward that God has stored up for hacia the wife of Pharaoh few other distinctions in the encounter with this figure that seems to be the prophet Jethro instead of meeting seven Shepherd S's in the desert as in the Bible account Moses encounters only two instead of ten plagues the Quran speaks of nine miracles which include some of the plagues that the blood the frogs and so forth also new is the fact that the burning bush appears at night and also new is the incident of the magicians actually converting to Moses religion and dying for that belief so that in a nutshell is the qur'an's view of Moses whom the prophet and spoke of as one of the four great prophets of history another of these great prophets celebrated by Muslims in particular as the archetype of the Prophet Muhammad even more than Moses and mentioned in the Quran even as a Muslim with a small M if you like ie one who had fully submitted to God was the patriarch Abraham or Ibrahim as the grant calls him now fewer than 25 chapters of the Quran have descriptions of him in fact Moses is the only biblical prophet mentioned more frequently in the Quran there are one or two interesting passages in the Quran that illustrate its own specifically Abraham that I'd like to share with you I don't know if there's another volunteer to read the standard passage from the Quran we had John yesterday perhaps yeah thank you it's not no this is some something that yep and they gave him his right guidance before the time of Moses and we did know him when he said to his father and his people what are these idols to which you are devoted in worship they said we found our fathers worshipping them he said verily you and your fathers are you playing Aaron they said have brought us the truth or are you jesting he said nay your Lord is the Lord the heavens and the earth he created them from nothing and I testified that truth by God I shall outwit your idols have you gone away and turn your backs then he smashed the Isles into pieces all except the large one so that they might turn to it and they said when they had returned who has done this to our gods surely it must be some mischief maker they said we have heard a youth talk of them his name is Abraham they said then bring him before the eyes of the people so that they might witness when Abraham was there he said is it you who has done this to our God's o Abraham he said may this Isle greatest among them has done so ask them if they can speak and once they turn to themselves confound and said to each other you are the real you you are the real wrongdoers thank you story about Abraham that appears nowhere in the Bible a little anecdote about how he convinced his people when he was still very young that the idols to which they were devoted actually had no power he smashed them up except for one and when they came in the morning horrified at this sight he said why did he ask the big one if you think that they're so powerful and of course they were confounded interesting account perfectly in the Bible spirit there's no reason why it shouldn't be in the Bible but in fact it appears only in the Quran but really the currents main interest in Abraham revolves around his foundation of the primordial house of divine worship the Kaaba in Mecca some Muslim historians affirmed that Adam himself worshiped in that place before being after being forgiven by God for having eaten of the forbidden fruit in paradise there a number of Muslim legends that affirmed this but Abraham was the first actually to build a temple on that spot Allen earth did Abraham fetch up in Arabia well Mecca was was on the trade route from Palestine down to the spy cities of of the Yemen there was a good deal of traffic backwards and forwards and it's not an unreasonable place for him to have visited although obviously his visit to Mecca is not unambiguously explained in the Bible given the concerns of those who carried out the redaction of the Pentateuch no particular reason why such an incident should have been included so the Muslim historians recount how Abraham's bonds made haja was rejected by Sarah this ties in with what I was saying about the hard yesterday she sought refuge with the infant Ishmael in the wilderness in Genesis 2 there seems to be an allusion to this God sent an angel to Hagar I will multiply thy seed exceedingly that it shall not be numbered for multitude behold thou art with child and shall bear a son and shall call his name Ishmael because the Lord has heard thy affliction and in Genesis 17 verses 20 to 21 abraham prays for ishmael in this way oh that Ishmael might live before thee and God said to him as for Ishmael I have heard thee behold I have blessed him and I will make him a great nation and the Arabs and the Jews unanimously concur that the Arabs are the descendants of Ishmael just as the Jews of the descendants of Isaac hydron Ishmael are left in the valley of Mecca by Abraham on God's instructions Ishmael still a toddler cries with first and God hears him and causes the well of Zamzam to bubble up and it is there to this day and today the right of the Hajj in large measure deliberate recollections of this Abrahamic past for instance when you go to Mecca you will see underneath a kind of crystal dome the very spot where Abraham is said to have stood while he directed the construction of the Kaaba the seven fold hastening between the little hillocks of Safa and Marwah which i mentioned yesterday our deliberate recollection of Hajj arose desperate search for water for her son Ishmael and the pilgrims drink from the well of Zamzam and its traditional to fill up containers and bring home some of this holy water to give to friends and relations after occurring out the Hajj and all of this is constructed to show Islam as the Ishmaelite aspect of Abraham's covenant with God so in the quran surah 2 verse 1 - 5 - 8 we read and we made the house the Kaaba a place of gathering for all mankind and a sanctuary adopt the place where Abraham stood as a place of worship and we commanded Abraham and Ishmael to purify our house for those who walk around it and those who meditate in it and those who bow down and prostrate and when Abraham prayed my Lord make this city of peace and bestow fruits upon its people such of them as believe in God and the last day and when Abraham and Ishmael were raising the foundations of the house they prayed our lord accept from us this act you are indeed the all-hearing the all-knowing and this prayer which is actually one of the most famous in the whole quran then goes on this is called the prayer of abraham and it shows abraham asking god to send the prophet muhammad o our lord he says make us submitters to you mostly mane and rays from among our offspring a community who will be submitters to you show us our ways of worship and relent towards us you are indeed the forgiving the merciful our Lord and raise up from among them a messenger who shall recite your revelations to them and teach them the scripture and the wisdom and purify them you are the all-powerful the wise another explicitly Abrahamic sign of this covenant is of course the Rite of circumcision without exception the prophets have been circumcised it's the sign of the unbroken unveil n't unviolated covenant with God in Islam as in Judaism it's actually an obligation although whereas in Judaism it has to be done on the eighth day in Islam it can be done anytime during the youth of the male child I mean places like Turkey for instance it's done that's almost at the age of adolescence and such cultures it can become a kind of initiation right into manhood all those generally preferred to do it when the childhood as a baby adult converts in several schools of islamic law are excused I've spoken about some of the prophets that linked the three Abrahamic faith faith so I've talked about David and Moses and Abraham in particular and you can read for yourselves about others by the simple expedient of looking them up in the index of any translation of the Koran and what I want to do now is move on and investigate the rather more complex question of the last of the biblical prophet Jesus of earth as I mentioned Judaism has rejected his claims to Messiah hood Islam has accepted them however Jesus is viewed very differently by Islam and by traditional Orthodox Christianity in fact a couple of years ago and the Islam paper and my faculty and Cambridge one of the questions for the students was is Jesus a unifying figure for Christians and for Muslims and I think probably the examiner bolder or googly on that one so familiar expression to bola googley but it means to to throw the ball in a curveball okay sometimes sometimes any subtitles on it oh really do you mean I've actually said something interesting this morning okay and extremely useful expression googley they're literally hundreds if you want a lecture on cricketing terminology I'm your man that there are hundreds of different ways that the ball can be projected and this is a type of curveball anyway to get back to to the narrative it wasn't a fair question ready to put before these undergraduates because it's one of the most difficult points is Jesus a unifying figure for Christians and for Muslims and I'm not sure I could answer that question there is a lot of overlap but there are also very fundamental points of difference and the way I want to examine this question is by looking at aspects of the historic encounter between these two daughter fades of Judaism now this historic interaction between the followers of Muhammad and the followers of Jesus is probably the most fraught of all instances of interfaith encounter and very often continues to be so it's also the most interesting and most well-documented three centuries ago the great dr. Johnson could say civilization is twofold there is Christianity and Mohammedanism all the rest may be considered as barbarous nowadays of course we'd want to include Chinese Indian and other great civilizations and the rank of major cultures but Johnson's comment is in a sense a summary of history as many Europeans have traditionally seen it the Muslims are the only other people worth worth talking to was dealing with thanks to its geography medieval Christian christened 'm had little experience with most world religions as i said yesterday if you went south or east from medieval europe you bumped into muslims islam however was a lot better placed islam was at the center of the ancient world and muslim scholars very soon had interesting encounters and discussions with buddhists with Indian Hindus with zoroastrians with Christians with Jews so we find for instance one of the first great works of objective comparative religion is the work of the great Baghdad scholar al biruni he wrote in the tenth century who went to India and actually taught himself Sanskrit and debated with the Hindu pundits and wrote a huge three-volume work called takuya kimura wind and ascertaining of what is in India in which he says that although superficially hinduism might seem to be a form of idolatry in reality in its higher forms it believes in the absolute unity of the divine and should be respected and dubbed with on that basis for interesting book I'm not sure there's an English translation but there's one in French if you want to look at it very objective very very scholarly and so I cite this as an example of Islam's really strategic advantage it was easier for Muslims to write about other religions and that it was for medieval Christians nonetheless it's still the case that the other religion that most interested medieval Muslims Wyles Christianity this was I think for three main reasons firstly Christianity was Islam's great militant rival the border in Byzantium secondly Christianity was far and away the largest minority religion in core territories of the Muslim world in fact the Muslims are only a majority in the lands they ruled three or four centuries after the initial conquest before that time the population had been mainly Christian in Egypt Muslims over only overtook the Christians sometime in the 13th or 14th century thirdly Christianity figures very largely in the Quran and it was this that prompted amongst the Muslim theologians further often quite searching inquiries about Jesus of Nazareth who was he and about Christian belief we find this in particular amongst the authors of the very voluminous quranic commentaries whenever there's a reference to Jesus the commentators illuminate it so we can conclude that in the pre-modern period at any rate by far the most consistent and detailed dialogue or literary interaction between two religious cultures has been that which took place between Christianity and Islam in some respects that is still the case today although it's I think true to remark that Christians nowadays take a more lively and often more intelligent interest in other religions than do modern Muslims whether they do this on some sometimes for genuinely canape chimerical reasons or occasionally for missionary purposes nonetheless Christian writing on other religions is more interesting and better research than his most modern Muslim writing this is some demonstrably the case and perhaps one reason for this is that Muslims have an unfortunate tendency to view Christianity as something of a secondary or a spent force in today's world and when they want to write polemical works or to dialogue with another civilization or with the West they tend to target or interact with Western secular modernity rather than with Christianity which I believe is a mistake but this is what most Muslims tend to do now so let's launch this this discussion of the interaction of the two faiths by taking the narrative back to the possibly unifying figure of Jesus and there's a discrepancy on a for those who are interested in dialogue here because the Bible doesn't seem to mention Islam or the Prophet Muhammad but the Quran refers to Christianity repeatedly so there's always an asymmetry in dialogue the Muslims have material to work with when they talk about Jesus the Christians don't have scriptural material to work with when they talk about Muhammad and what's the Quran say about Christianity well sometimes it's references are favorable sometimes they're quite reproachful for instance zero to verse 62 those who believe are even Muslims and those who are jews and the christians and the Sabian's we don't need to know who those are for our purposes whoever believes in god and the last day and acts uprightly they shall have their reward from their Lord so apparently very pluralistic open statement another verse reads this is your a 5 verse 82 you will find the closest in love to the believers to be those who say we are Christians that is because among them are priests and monks and because they are not proud quite possible and many of the Muslim commentators support this that this verse was revealed shortly after that first Muslims in Mecca had made that migration to Christian Abyssinia whereas no doubt dr. Jackson was explained to you they were received very warmly and given the protection of the Christian King Venegas so this verse may be a reflection of that another verse we I II God gave Jesus the gospel and in the hearts of his followers we set kindness and mercy and monasticism that they invented we did not prescribe it for them though they were only desiring to please God but they did not observe it a right this is your 57 verse 27 this passage we see a kind of ambiguous criticism of monasticism which was an enormous ly important institution in the Middle East at the time of the Quran was was revealed and the Prophet himself condemned monasticism rather more forcefully with the words there is no monasticism in Islam this is because ultimately Islam sees the world as not for but as capable of reforming itself individual Souls can reform themselves the world human society structures can reform themselves they are not so ultimately for fallen as to need direct divine intervention to do that hence you don't need to retreat from the world and live in a monastery if you aspire to to holiness you can do it in the world you can go through it rather than going around it next verse is zero five verse 14 and this is taken as a reference to the New Covenant as preached by Paul with those who say we are Christians we made a covenant but they forgot a part of the admonition so we stirred up discord and division among them until the day of resurrection this may be a reference to the great christological disputes which had thrown the Christian world into sectarian tumult something that the early Muslims were particularly aware of since the Middle East was so religiously divided at the time with Jacobites Nestorians Copts monophysites Orthodox Aryans etc etc and perhaps some Christians themselves would agree with the Quranic view that this was some kind of divine punishment for having misunderstood the nature of Jesus was how it was understood however the most substantial Quranic references to Christian themes are found in the qur'an's narratives of the Annunciation and the Nativity and here we have very extensive passages in the Quran so for instance in Sura 3 verses 31 to 7 we read about the birth of Mary who is dedicated to God perhaps as some later Muslim commentators have speculated as a one of the temple virgins in Jerusalem the text goes on her Lord accepted her graciously and made her grow in grace Zechariah took charge of her whenever Zachariah entered the sanctuary to her he found beside her a provision he said Oh Mary how did you come by this she replied it is from God God provides without reckoning for whomsoever he will like several of the Quranic references to the Virgin Mary this includes non Bible material in fact there's more about the Virgin Mary in the Quran than there is under the New Testament and perhaps one should point out here the function of Mary in Muslim piety particularly interesting obviously to those who have a Catholic commitment Virgin Mary is revered in the Quran she works miracles some perfectly respectable medieval Muslim theologians have numbered her amongst the prophets because God speaks to her and that's the definition of what a prophet is God speaks to you directly however Mary although her virginity is affirmed is not regarded as Theotokos the mother of God because of course Jesus in the Muslim view is not God incarnate but merely another divinely inspired prophet so although the Blessed Virgin is very revered by Muslims and is seen as some kind of model nonetheless she doesn't have such an exalted place in the divine economy of salvation that he'll find her playing in in Catholicism and particularly in recent Catholicism it was only in 1950 that the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin was declared to be divinely inspired doctrine by by the Vatican so again we have another figure who seems to be a point of contact and possible fruitful interaction between Muslims and Christians but when we look a little bit further we see that there are in fact key differences Mary as I'm sorry did you have a question the front is there there's been some discussion about that I mean why of all the planets are born why is Jesus born it's just like it just regarded as one of Mary's miracles with no further significance in the New Testament obviously it's regarded as the expression of the immaculate coming into the world of the logos who has to come into the world in a way that's unpolluted by fleshly sin or whatever Islam conceiving in those terms because sexuality has as in Judaism been regarded rather more positively and the Muslim tradition than in Christianity so the accounts of the conception of the Prophet Muhammad for instance are quite explicitly sexual there's no implication of a Immaculate Conception there but it's been carried over from Christianity into the Muslim conception but but diminished if you like and reduced merely to the level of one of her miracles and rather than anything with great cosmological importance another point that's perhaps interesting to bear in mind is Mary as role model she is another of these four women whom the Prophet mentioned as perfected women women without sin however she has in practice not functioned as a model for Muslim women in the way that she has for Christian women with Orthodox and Catholic less so obviously for the Protestant churches and the reason for this is precisely that her virginity is not in the Muslim view of things esteemed or steam herbal in the Muslim context in a way that it can be in in Christianity and the role model for Muslim women traditionally has been Fatima the prophet daughter not the Virgin Mary and there's an interesting commentary on this by some feminist writers incidentally there's a an American Catholic and one of the Maryknoll community of liberal Catholics who's written a book on on women's spirituality and she points out that one of the problems that some modern women can have with with Mary as a model is that it seems that her perfection is conditional upon her transcending of her body and Heather normal physical functions and this carried over very much into early Christian ideas of female sanctity that the ideal woman was a nun was a virgin that she rejected motherhood and the normal functions of her gender in Islam interestingly we find although she is venerated as a kind of unique figure she's not seen as a model so much as his fatima and fall team as greatness is precisely the fact that she engendered the prophet's descendants that little bait she is the fertile for Jenny tricks of this effectively spiritual elite amongst the Muslims and as a model for Muslim women she affirms rather than questions the spiritual value of motherhood and more old Neil's book is I think quite interesting in drawing this comparison um a little bit more about some the Blessed Virgin in Serie 19 verses 16 to 34 we get the story of the Annunciation one of the most beautiful passages in the Quran particularly in Arabic has a lovely rhythm it rhymes it really is quite exquisite I have some of it here I don't know if there's another volunteer for reading this one just thank you very much mentionin look Mary when she withdrew from her people to an easterly place she took in front of them in Vail then we went sent her to our spirit who appeared to her as man without father she said i seek refuge and the merciful god from you if you fear God he said I'm of The Messenger of God to bestow upon you a pure son she said how may I have a son when no man has touched me and I was not unchaste he said thou shalt be your Lord he said it is easy for me that we may make him a sign unto the people and a mercy from us it is a thing decree okay so that's quite familiar to Christian readers it's very similar to the biblical account although there are a few differences and but then we get the story of the Nativity which is very different and all is completely unfamiliar to read the gospel and the pains of childbirth drove her to the trunk of palm tree she cried would that I had died before this and had been a thing forgetting forgotten then he called her from beneath her grief not Lord has set before you a stream shaped towards you the trunk of your palm and it will drop moist right Davis Thanks the narrative continues to describe her bringing the child to have people and they accuse her of unchastity she demonstrates the supernatural nature of the happening by pointing to the infant Jesus who miraculously speaks from his cradle he says in the Abdullah I am God's servant he has given me the book and made me a prophet he has made me blessed wherever I may be now he says this specifically to refute the poor line take on on Christology which the Koran is concerned to to counteract he says in the Abdullah I am God's servant not I am God and the son of God I am God's servant and in Islam's view that's the highest and most exalted the rank to which anybody can aspire to be a true servant of God he has given me the book ie Jesus has been given a book he and the Quran affirms that the injeel which is a Arabization of the word evangelist the good news is one of the four written scriptures that we explicitly now have been given to human beings whereas in the Christian perspective of course Jesus isn't given the book the book is written about him by the four evangelists Raja a La Nina bien and he made me a prophet now Jesus is a prophet according to a certain Christian perspective but of course is more than that so the first three things he says from the cradle are constructed so as to refute the the mainstream Christian view of who Jesus of Nazareth was and then it goes on it's by the ways Koran seer in 19 verses 28 to 42 34 now this accounts particularly where it touches on the nativity is pretty unfamiliar it's foreign to the four Gospels foreign to the extra canonical Gospels in fact although there's a lot of legendary material that appeared in the first few centuries after Jesus's birth we can't find any parallels whatsoever in any of that literature this is something new Joseph is written out of the story so a Bethlehem and the manger the image instead is the rather austere one of a solitary woman giving birth underneath a palm tree somewhere in the wilderness to the east of Jerusalem and then returning to face the scandal the only recognizable feature really is the idea of the virginal conception so the Quran gives us this fairly full although fairly unfamiliar account of Jesus's origin in the world constructed always for political purposes to emphasize his humanity the doctrine of Immaculate Conception which is retained does not logically conflict with the idea that he was a human being however the later career of Jesus is portrayed very thinly indeed and the Crown's really not very interested in it we are told in surah 3 verses 45 to 53 that Jesus had huar a young disciples we learn in surah 5 verse 1 1 oh that he was sent to the children of Israel confirming the Torah with some amendments another important point in the Muslim view Jesus lived his life as a believing gieux he works miracles he brings the dead to life that's in the Quran he heals the blind and the lame and he brings a clay bird to life he holds a bird of clay in his hand breathes on it and brings it to life that's not in the four Gospels but interestingly it does appear in the agnostic Gospel of Thomas which was one of the Gospels found at NAG Hammadi in Egypt about 50 years ago so there is a precedent for that one but most deafeningly of all and again all in the context of its critique of Pauline Christianity the Quran appears to deny the crucifixion 0 4 verse 1 5 7 2 8 reads they the Jews did not kill him they did not crucify him but it was made to seem so to them those who differ about him are in doubt concerning him they have no knowledge about him but follow mere opinion certainly they did not kill him but God raised him to himself now this is frankly an obscure passage and it's given rise to many divergent commentaries the phrase were lurking should be hella home but it was made to seem so to them just two or three words in Arabic is sometimes taken to mean that a likeness of Jesus was crucified in his stead some medieval exegetes for instance largely on the basis of speculation say that God in order to save his prophet transfigured the face of Judas who betrayed him to make him look like Jesus and he was taken by the Roman soldiers and crucified in jesus's instead and there are a number of other theories that the Muslim commentators have advanced an explanation of this verse but what is clear is that the Quran denies the crucifixion particularly in the fashion that the evangelists recorded now it doesn't need to do so on its own theology Jesus could have died on the cross could even have been resurrected but this would not necessarily have entailed any faith in Jesus as God as a divine being or in an atoning sacrifice for original sin that narrative could have preserved could have been there in the Quranic narrative without interrogating the qur'an's fundamental theological assumptions it would just be another case of the temporary triumph of human evil with no larger theological implications yep [Music] counter that have you seen that someone I say I think you know this isn't one of the things that has really framed it sounds very much like what Christians call the heresy of a certain when Jesus only appeared yeah to have had a human form they were coming at it from if you were truly God he could not take it over flesh in it full as movie everything in from the other extreme is God the single biggest advice okay so I was asking the question why is it that the Quran denies the crucifixion if to include that narrative would not have questioned its basic assumptions well it is probably the case that the Quran does this as a rhetorical device to deny the doctrine traditionally held by Pauline Christianity that doctrine namely that divinity of Jesus is denounced by the Quran in surah 4 verse 1 7 100 people of the book this means Jews and Christians be not extreme in your religion and speak of God only the truth the Messiah son of Mary is only the Messenger of God and His Word which he placed in Mary and a spirit from him so believed in God and his messengers and do not say 3 cease it is better for you God is only one God far exalted is he above having a son and on the basis of this verse majoritarian Islam has traditionally attached the rather opprobrious label of shirk of compromising the principle of the divine unity to Christianity to grave accusation since precisely the same term is used in the Quran polemic against the idolaters of Correggio in Mecca the Quranic Jesus of course himself denies this as as I mentioned he says in the Abdullah I am the servant of God so to sum up then the Quran affirms Jesus but as prophet and as Messiah rather than as God key aspects of his gospel ministry like his preaching of the imminence of the vassal a hostile fee on the the imperial rule of God or the kingdom of God absent entirely the pictures fleshed out somewhat by hadith narratives and a lot of ascetic stories which filtered into the early Muslim community following contact with Christian anchorites or the conversion of Christians to to Islam but Islam's Jesus is always Jesus the man the wandering ascetic prophet of Galilee who affirms the law and is sent only to Israel sent only to the lost sheep of the children of Israel and does not believe himself to have a universal mission so that Johan ein and the poor line Jesus has vanished without trace anyway that's the Quranic understanding of the Prophet Jesus and what I want to do now is sketch something of the subsequent history of Muslim Christian interaction the Muslims armed with this new scripture immediately and apparently miraculously conquered most of the Christian world within a few decades and they found themselves suddenly ruling not just one but very many Christian denominations so throughout the medieval period when you read Muslim discourses on Christianity you have to remember that they were encountering different Christian denominations you have to know exactly what concepts of Jesus for instance they were they were discussing the great church of Byzantium the official denomination of the Byzantine Empire which had ruled most of these countries before the Muslims appeared on the scene upheld the formula that had been agreed on in the early fifth century at the Council of Chalcedon and which was the formula of God having one substance but three hypostasis um I won't going to the details of that it's a complex subject however but in much of the Near East this great church was actually a minority Creed most Christians didn't accept it most Egyptians and a lot of Syrians these are the cops and Jacobites respectively and followed Monophysite doctrine which held that Christ's divine and human nature were completely fused and this position was frequently subjected to official persecutions as was also the Nestorian doctrine which emphasized the human nature of Christ and it was this adversarial situation amongst Near Eastern Christians that really opened the door to large-scale conversions to Islam for years abstract hair-splitting divisions over the procession of the holy ghost from the father or the similarity of Christ's substance - to that of the father had exhausted Christian resources and no doubt there are plenty of people who privately had grown disillusioned with the whole debate and I think this is one reason why the Companions of the Prophet when they arrived on the scene found near Easterners whether Arab or non Arab very sympathetic listeners to this new and and simple conception of God so there followed the extraordinary story of the the mass apostasy of Near Eastern Christians to Islam the only great Christian apostasy in history in fact more interestingly still one that took place without duress 300 years before in North Africa at the time of Augustine there had been no fewer than 700 bishops in North Africa three centuries after the Arab conquest the last one flickers out and the Christian story in North Africa disappears congregations of great churches such as that of Gaza for instance embraced Islam on mass there's a new book about Gaza which documents this in some detail Gaza had been very resistant to Christianity and eventually and the old paganism had to be rooted out by force and a cathedral built on the site of the temple and it took three or four hundred years for Gaza really to become Christian but within a few years of Islam arriving on this the congregation of that church itself accepted Islam it was converted into a mosque how on earth could this thing have happened well I think it can be seen as a confirmation of the personal charisma of the conquerors that's how I view it there is a traditional European thesis which says that the Arabs coming from Arabia with these mad fanatical primitive tribesmen interested envy and plunder loot and so forth but such people if they'd been like that simply would not have disturbed the faith of deeply sincerely Christian communities that their barbarism would simply have have driven their the communities back on their own spiritual resources I suspect here that the traditional Muslim case is actually to be taken quite seriously the Companions must have had a charisma a spiritual charisma which the devout Eastern Christians immediately recognized to suggest a half of Christendom just abandoned Christ for material gain whatever that might have been he's surely incompatible with what we know of the great tenacity in many situations of the Christian faith now what's more interesting about this process of conversion is that actually the early Muslims who were presiding over it were not particularly well-informed about Christian doctrine there was no philosophical theology in in Arabia and there had been a Christian Muslim dialogue which took place during the the prophet's ministry when the Bishop of Nidoran and his entourage visited Medina late in the prophet's life it's an interesting episode by the way because the Prophet actually allowed the bishop to celebrate Mass in in the mosque but despite this kind of early contact we find Muslim theologians writing about Christianity for several hundred years really not understanding Christian doctrine particularly well for instance is somebody called Gordon Newby who in 1989 produced a book called the making of the last prophet and he examines in depth the early sections are even his house biography of the Prophet even is Haq assumed that for instance prophets Jonah and Samson actually came after Jesus that was the extent of the lack of knowledge about some about Christianity and Judaism that many of the Muslim conquerors had but this book was very widely accepted and we can only conclude from this that the Muslim intelligentsia really didn't have a particularly detailed view of the biblical narrative it also presumes that there wasn't too much dialogue going on all these egregious errors would have been corrected seems to be the case that the early conquerors didn't have that much of an interest then in the religion of their subjects it's only in the earlier buried period that say 150 years or so after the prophets death that we find detailed dialogues first appearing one of the best-known of these that's been preserved is an encounter between the Abbasid caliph al Mahdi and the Nestorian and Catholicos head of an historian Church who is called Timothy I'll briefly sketch and the outlines of this debate the Caliph kicks off by remarking that Jesus can't be divine since he was born in time quoting John's gospel I go to my god and your God and pointing out that if Jesus himself worshiped God was he thereby worshiping himself he goes on to complain that the process by which the four Gospels were compiled is poorly documented so that clear references to a post-christian Prophet Muhammad supposedly present an original gospel given to Jesus are removed the only relevant prophecy he does speak of and this is a recurrent feature of from Islamic discussion is Jesus's promise of the future presence of the Paraclete who is traditionally associated in Christianity with the Holy Spirit but which Muslims identify with the Prophet Muhammad as the Spirit of Truth who will come and the Caliph also cites the image of the rider on the camel who will come to deliver Israel this is in Isaiah but Timothy in his report says that this refers to the fall of Babylon to Cyrus and then there's a very complex discussion which revolves around the Trinity which the Caliph insists is a form of try theism and it seems that the contest ended in stalemate so this debate between the Catholicos Timothy and the caliph al Mahdi is the first detailed account we have of an intelligent informed encounter between Muslims and Christians the early medieval period also witnessed the steady growth of a Muslim polemical literature about Christianity and one of the most influential of these was a work attributed to famous al-ghazali who died in 1111 easy date to remember and he wrote a book or it's traditionally ascribed him at any rate which he called the beautiful refutation of the divinity of Christ using the gospel text and here the author recognizes that it's pretty difficult persuading Christians of the Muslim doctrine on the basis of the Quran and so he uses the gospel translations of the gospel in order to refute the idea that Jesus considered himself to be divine another polemicist was someone called Ali eben Arab an October II wrote important book called the book of religion and Empire he was a convert from Christianity and he lists what he considers to be biblical prophecies of Muhammad but more influential still was the corridor Byrne theologian and jurist eben hasn't one of the greatest albeit most controversial of medieval Muslim thinkers 10th 11th century and urban hasn't had a book about Christian doctrine which is not just the usual pattern of the rehearsal of stock answers stock debates which is a standard in the literature but clearly reflects authentic experiences of dialogue that he had had with Christians so he has just to take an example Christians defending the Trinity with the assertion that since God is living and knowing he has life and knowledge and his life is the spirit and his knowledge is the son so obviously there were some Christians around who saw it as an effective way of justifying the doctrine of the Trinity to identify these two components of the Trinity with two divine attribute Muslims of course have a doctrine of divine attributes attributes if in hazzan we'll have none of this and he retort that God has a lot of other attributes such as vision and speech and power for instance these are also his but this doesn't necessarily inclined us to any belief that they are by pasta sized gods within God or that we can pray to those things as recognizable entities another Spanish thinker was a certain Abdullah at our a German book nowadays lamentably neglected he's interesting in that he wrote an autobiography which medieval Muslims usually didn't and he started off life as a Catalan priest he was called Frey and Selma thought Amedda quite a well-known a theologian since he was a Dominican and he as he explains in his autobiography became dissatisfied with Christian teaching read clandestine Muslim literature which in areas recently conquered from Muslims in Spain was not a terribly difficult thing to do he traveled to Tunis where he announced his conversion he wrote a book called the gift of the intelligent which is still very widely circulated amongst Muslim and people who are engaged in dialog will often find Muslims citing from from this book in addition to these writers we also find the Muslim theologians the philosophical theologians discussing Christian theology generally without polemic intents they were merely interested in recording different different philosophical systems the best-known of these was a man called Shara Stanley he died in 1153 who wrote a book called katha burn Miller whenever a book out the book of religion and sects in which he lists and describes really quite objectively the different religious views of his time so there's a section on Buddhism for instance Hinduism Judaism and Christianity and he does the conventional thing by blaming Paul for distorting the pristine teachers of Jesus he says he mixed them with the teachings of the Philosopher's and the wicked suggestions of his heart and then he goes on to describe the main Christian denominations which were available to him the Orthodox the Nestorians Jacobites and he provides an Arabic translation of the Nicene Creed and shahara Stanley's long account of Christianity is probably the most sophisticated and balanced account that medieval Muslims came up with and it's fairly I think it's it's a fairly objective one and it was influential until the contemporary period after his time discussions became more or less repetitive and I think we can pass over later contributions in silence and since it's 10:30 we might as well take a break here if you're agreeable what I want to do in the second half of this is to look at the mirror image of this discussion namely the traditional Christian understandings of Islam okay you

Channel: Islam On Demand

Views: 35,783

Rating: 4.7911229 out of 5

Keywords: Abdal, Hakim, Murad, Islam, Isa, Issa, Moses, Musa, Torah, Jerusalem, Palestine, Israel, Jew, Jews, Jewish, Scrolls, Jesus, Christ, Christianity, Bible, Gospels, Church, Baptism, Holy, Spirit, Trinity, Son, God, Allah, Divinity, Virgin, Birth, Mother, Saint, Disciples, Apostles, Vatican, Pope, Monotheism, Muhammad, Comforter, Religion, Abraham, Noah, Catholic, Catholicism, Hail, Mary, Immaculate, Conception, Nicea, Nicean, Salvation, Savior, Lord, Vicarious, Atonement, Died, Sins, Evangelical, Communion, Baptist, Unitarian, Blood, Crucify, Crucifixion, Cross

Id: Mv_wKR9hoK4

Length: 83min 17sec (4997 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 22 2011