Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

2 t CHAPTER ONE
David and Solomon, and yes, John the Baptist, Jesus, and the Virgin
Mary.
“In the Beginning . . .”
The Quran’s account of Creation is similar to that of the Bible in
intent and some detail: both insist on an omnipotent creation from
nothing, for example, and on the Creator’s fashioning of humankind.
It is not laid out here in the linear narrative fashion of Genesis
(or of other books of the Bible), however. It is immediately
apparent that the Muslim Scripture is a collection of revelations,
which Muslims claim were given by God to Muhammad over the
last twenty-two years of his life. In our copies of the Quran these
revelations are divided into 114 suras, or chapters, although some
of the suras almost certainly contain more than one revelation, and
they are arranged not in the order they were delivered but according
to their descending length. Rather than a single narrative or
story, the Quran is an assembly of “occasional” revelations bestowed
under particular circumstances, some of which we can
plausibly identify and many others we cannot. Thus, the events of
God’s Creation are introduced at various appropriate points—appropriate
to God’s purpose of warning and instructing—rather
than at the very outset on the linear narrative model of Genesis.
Genesis tells the story of Creation; the Quran simply alludes to it.
When Creation events are cited in the Quran, they are generally in
résumé form and presented as moral examples, to underline God’s
power, for instance, or his goodness.
The Name(s) and Nature of God
Who is this deity? In Exodus 3:14 Moses boldly asks God his name
and the response is (in Hebrew) ehyeh (“I am”) asher (“who” or
“that which”), whose meaning—“I am who I am”? “What I am”?
“What I will be”?—is by no means clear. The Israelites called him
something very similar, Yahweh, which shows up as early as Gene-