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Jesus is not only central to Christianity; he is also venerated throughout
Islam. Christians may be surprised to learn that Muslims believe in the
Virgin Birth and Jesus' miracles. But this shared interest in his message
goes much further.
In the Muslim view, Jesus' essential work was not to replicate bread or to
test our credulity, but to complement the legalism of the then original
Torah with a leavening compassion rarely expressed in the older testament.
His actions and words introduce something new to monotheism: They show the
mercy of God.
Jesus confirmed the Torah, stressing the continuity of his lineage, but he
also developed the importance of compassion and self-purification as
crucial links between learning the words of God's message and possessing
the wisdom to carry it out.
Oddly enough, some of the recent work by New Testament scholars seems to
have reached a view of Jesus not all that different from Muslims'. For
them, Jesus appears not as a literal son of God in human form, but as an
inspired human being, a teacher of wisdom with a talent for love drawn
from an unbroken relationship to God. Both versions present him as a man
who spoke to common people in universal terms.
Two events in the life of the Prophet Muhammad may help explain why
Muslims revere the Christian Jesus. The first event involves an elder
resident of Mecca named Waraqa bin Nawfal. This man was an early Arab
Christian and a cousin of Muhammad's wife, Khadija. He could read Hebrew
and was mystical by nature. He attended Khadija and Muhammad's wedding in
about 595 CE.
Fifteen years later, a worried Khadija sought Waraqa out and brought her
husband to him. At the time, Muhammad was a 40-year-old respected family
man. He was frightened. He had been meditating one evening in a cave on
the outskirts of town. There, he had experienced something so disturbing
that he feared he was possessed. A voice had spoken to him.
Waraqa listened to his story, which was Muhammad's first encounter with
the angel Gabriel. When it was finished, Waraqa assured him he was not
possessed. "What you have heard is the voice of the same spiritual
Messenger God sent to Moses. I wish I could be a young man when you become
a Prophet. I would like to be alive when your own people expel you."
"Will they expel me?" Muhammad asked.
"Yes," the old man said. "No one has ever brought his people the news you
bring without meeting hostility. If I live to see that day, I will support
you."
Christians will recognize in Waraqa's remarks an aphorism associated with
Jesus: "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country." But that
a Christian should first have verified Muhammad's role as a Prophet may
come as a surprise.
The second important event concerning Islam and Christianity dates from
616, a few years after Muhammad began to preach publicly. This first
attempt to reinstate the Abrahamic tradition in Mecca met (as Waraqa had
warned) with violent opposition. Perhaps the Meccans resented Muhammad's
special claim. Perhaps his message of a single, invisible, ever-present
God threatened, in addition to their inherited traditions, the economy of
their city. A month's ride south from the centers of power in Syria and
Persia, poor remote Mecca depended on long-distance trade and on seasonal
pilgrims who came there each year to honor hundreds of pagan idols, paying
a tax to do so.
At any rate, Muhammad's disruptive suggestion that "God was One" and could
be worshipped anywhere did not sit well with the businessmen of Mecca.
Many new Muslims were being tortured. Their livelihoods were threatened,
their families persecuted. As matters grew worse, in 616 Muhammad sent a
small band of followers across the
Red Sea to seek shelter in the Christian
kingdom of Axum. There,
he told them, they would find a just ruler, the Negus, who could protect
them. The Muslims found the Negus in his palace, somewhere in the
borderland between modern Ethiopia and Eritrea.
After one Muslim recited to him some lines on the Virgin Mary from the
Qur'an, the Negus wept at what he heard. Between Christians and Muslims,
he said, he could not make out more difference than the thickness of a
twig. These two stories underscore the support Christians gave Muhammad in
times of trial.
The Qur'an distils the meaning from the drama:
"And you will find the nearest in love to the believers (Muslims) those
who say: We are Christian. That is because amongst them are priests and
monks, and they are not proud. And when they listen to what has sent down
to the Messenger (Muhammad), you see their eyes overflowing with tears
because of the truth they have recognized." (5:82-83)
Even today, when a Muslim mentions Jesus' name, you will hear it followed
by the phrase "peace and blessings be upon him," because Muslims revere
him as a Prophet. "Say (O Muslims): "We believe
in Allah and that which has been sent down to us and that which has been
sent down to Ibrahim (Abraham), Isma'il (Ishmael), Isahq (Issac), Ya'qub
(Jacob), and to Al-Asbat (the offspring of the twelve sons of Ya'qub
(Jacob), and that which has been given to Musa (Moses) and 'Isa (Jesus)
and that which has been given to the Prophets from their Lord. We make no
distinction between any of them, and to Him we have submitted (in Islam)."
(2:136)
As these lines from the Qur'an make clear, Muslims regard Jesus as one of
the world's great teachers. He and his mentor John the Baptist stand in a
lineage stretching back to the founder of ethical monotheism. Moreover,
among Muslims, Jesus is a special type of prophet; a Messenger empowered
to communicate divinity not only in words but by miracles as well.
Muslims believe that certain fictions were developed and added in the
fourth and fifth centuries to Christianity and the portrait of Jesus.
Three of these come in for special mention: First, Muslims consider
monastic asceticism a latter-day innovation, not an original part of
Jesus' way. Second, the New Testament suffers from deletions and
embellishments added after Jesus' death by men who did not know him.
Third, Muslims consider the description of Jesus as God's son a later,
blasphemous suggestion.
Muslims venerate Jesus as a divinely inspired human but never ever as "the
Son of God". In the same vein, they treat the concept of the Trinity as a
late footnote to Jesus' teachings, an unnecessary "mystery" introduced by
the North African theologian Tertullian two centuries after Jesus' death.
Nor do Muslims view his death as an act of atonement for mankind's sins.
Rather, along with the early Christian theologian Pelagius, Islam rejects
the doctrine of original sin, a notion argued into church doctrine by
St. Augustine
around the year 400.
Islam holds the true view of Jesus that was refused and condemned by the
fourth-century
Byzantine
Church.
Once Constantine installed Christianity as the Roman Empire's state
religion, a rage for orthodoxy followed. The Councils of Nicaea (325),
Tyre (335), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431), and Chalcedon (451) were
official, often brutal attempts to stamp out views of Jesus held by other
theologians whom the
Byzantine
Church
called heretical.
Rulings by these councils led to the persecution and deaths of tens of
thousands of early Christians at the hands of more "orthodox" Christians
who condemned them. Most disputes have centered until today on divergent
interpretations of the Trinity and the very nature of Jesus.Then and now,
no more dangerous religious mistake exists for a Muslim than dividing the
Oneness of God by twos or threes.
Despite these important differences, however, the Qur'an repeatedly
counsels Muslims not to dispute with other monotheists over matters of
doctrine except in a good manner and with respect and good words.
"And argue not with the People of the Scripture
unless it be in (a way) that is better, save with such of them as do
wrong; and say: 'We believe in that which hath been revealed unto us and
revealed unto you; our God and your God is One, and unto Him we
surrender.'" (29:46) |