Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

8. Defining and Defending
the Community of Believers
IT IS sometimes pointed out that there is no such thing
as “Judaism,” or “Christianity,” or “Islam” save what
we construct as such in our own minds: there are, in
truth, only Jews, Christians, and Muslims. To put it
somewhat more accurately, however, those names are
what the believers constructed in their own minds. The
three group designators were devised not by modern
social scientists but by members of the groups themselves,
early on. The conceptualized “Judaism” first
appears, in Greek, in 2 Maccabees 2:21; in 14: 38 the
phrase “practicing Judaism” is used. It is echoed by
Paul (Gal. 1:13–14). “Christian” is used quite self-consciously
as a very new membership marker in Acts
11:26, and “Christianity” (Gk. Christianismos; Lat.
Christianitas) appears, now as a fully domesticated
term, in Ignatius and Polycarp at the end of the first
and beginning of the second Christian century. “Islam”
has the most exalted pedigree of all. It was God’s own
designation of the “religion” to which he had summoned
the believers. Here, as often in the Quran, God
himself is speaking: “If anyone desires a religion (din)
other than Islam (al-islam), never will it be accepted of
him, and in the Hereafter he will be in the ranks of the
losers” (Quran 3:85). Muhammad is made to say to