Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DISCOVERING SCRIPTURE IN SCRIPTURE t 5
many of the early biblical figures from Adam to Solomon are
treated as prophets, the classic prophets of the biblical canon like
Jeremiah and Isaiah—two of the prophets most favored by Christians—are
not mentioned at all. The Exile and the Return are likewise
ignored, as is all subsequent Jewish history. The Quran was
interested in history in a very narrow sense. When Muhammad
speaks in Scripture, he is not so much explaining the past as he is
using it, and the biblical stories in the Quran are generally told for
a reason: sometimes as signs, demonstrations of God’s power, justice,
or goodness, or, more commonly, as punishment stories about
the consequences of ignoring prophets, particularly when they refer
to the people of Abraham, of Lot, of Noah or Moses.
The Quran speaks often and at times at length of the Children of
Israel—the Banu Israil, who in its eyes constituted both a community
(umma) and a religion (din). Unlike the legislation of the
Christian Roman Empire, which reserved the designation religio
uniquely for Christianity and characterized Judaism as superstitio,
the Quran recognizes multiple religions in the world, of which Islam
is one, along with that of the Children of Israel, the Christians,
and the pagans, “those who associate (others) with God.” Of these
latter Muhammad is made to say in the Quran, “To them their
religion and to me, mine.” The community of the Children of Israel
is tribal—it takes Muhammad some time, and probably some
Jewish assistance, to sort out the correct progenetic sequence of
Abraham, Isaac, Jacob/Israel—but its religion is scriptural. Like
Christianity and Islam after it, the din of the Children of Israel is
founded on the contents of a divinely revealed Book. Jews and
Christians are in fact often characterized in the Quran simply as
“People of the Book” without further description or distinction.
Although there were other divine books, like that given to Abraham
(Quran 87:19), the primacy of honor in the Israelite revelation
belongs to the Torah (Tawrat) sent down to Moses. Moses is
central to Muhammad’s closure with Judaism, and this is true
from the very earliest of the quranic revelations. The Torah revelation,
its prehistory, form, and modalities, is the prototype of the
quranic one. And it is Moses’ example, particularly in his dealings
with the Pharaoh, that provides the moral paradigm—persecu-