A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Jewish and Christian Views of Islam
Finally, we have the retrospective views of Judaism and Christianity looking
back upon Islam, the newcomer religion among them—and the view is much
less charitable. In contrast to Islam’s acceptance of huge parts of the Old and
New Testaments, both Judaism and Christianity reject Muhammad even as a
prophet of God. Not surprisingly, they also repudiate the idea that the Old
Testament and New Testament messages can in any way be “updated” by
Muhammad. Muhammad is treated in much Christian literature over the ages as
a heretic, even a devil, including being cast into one of the lowest circles of Hell
in Dante’s Inferno. (For that matter, Catholicism historically also viewed
Protestantism as heretical and the work of the devil, and the feelings were
mutual.)
THUS, THE RELATIONSHIPS among all three of the Abrahamic faiths are
complex and striking: they parallel each other in many respects, contradict each
other in yet others. Nonetheless, Islam represents a powerful new phase in the
continuity of the monotheistic tradition in the Middle East. Islam was born of,
and coexisted with, Christianity and Judaism in the same region. While Islam
indeed established a new political order, we are not talking about a brand-new
religion, new gods, or new perceptions of morality. If there had been no Islam,
the world would have been less rich culturally and intellectually, but the cultural
and theological groundwork of thinking in the Middle East might not have been
vastly different.
NEARLY ALL RELIGIONS DEVELOP out of earlier religions and doctrines.
Buddhism developed out of Hindu religion, culture, and philosophy even though
it is not viewed by Hindus as a heresy. Sikhism developed out of both Hinduism
and Islam. Baha’ism developed out of Christianity and Islam. In one sense,
heresy can become a creative act of evolutionary religious thinking as future
generations struggle to sharpen, clarify, and reinterpret those earlier religious
impulses and understandings, often in keeping with their contemporary cultural
surroundings.
Ironically, it is striking that it is the fine-grained details and culturally specific

---

characteristics within each of these religions that are viewed by their followers
as most essential to their faith; these details can even prompt violent action
against others. So when seemingly small theological differences can stir up
hatred, violence, and war, it is a sure sign that a great deal more is going on than
mere theological dispute. It is like a furious marital blowup in the kitchen over
whether the pasta is overcooked: the anger is very real, but outside observers
instantly grasp that something more is going on here beyond whether the pasta is
al dente.
So in the case of the Middle East and its religions, it is not the theology that
really represents the source of conflict. Other things are obviously at stake:
identities, communities, states, politics, power, regional nationalisms. Religion
serves as a handy tag, constitutes an important element of identity in which the
specific theology is really only incidental. In fact, we are rarely Christians,
Muslims, or Jews by choice; we are born into one of these traditions whose
richness of community we accept; it is not about balancing or choosing among
alternative theological arguments offered to us. Jewish communities have been a
powerful cultural force over history, but not because of the specific ritual details
of Judaism. Those could vary, and do. It is really the cultural identity and glue of
theology—any theology—that sustains a community on an ethnic or a religious
basis. The same goes for the diversity of Christian sects. The religion helps
establish communities; communities can drift into conflict or even war over
community security, resources, leadership, and turf.
In our modern era, the world has made some modest but serious steps toward
religious reconciliation and ecumenism, even acknowledgments of shared
commonalities. For example, our regular use of the term “Judeo-Christian” is
quite recent, coming to prominence only at the start of the twentieth century. It
was designed to acknowledge certain religious commonalities ignored in periods
of anti-Jewish discrimination during most of the history of Christianity—even
though, in theological terms, the differences between Christianity and Judaism
are the greatest among the three faiths. And in the past twenty or thirty years, we
now see the term “Abrahamic faiths” beginning to achieve some currency,
bringing Islam into the fold of commonality. Theologies have not changed much;
human desire to overcome the differences has.

---