Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 189
commentators, are filled with biblical and postbiblical tales filling
out the Quran’s sketches; they most often seem to come from very
early Christian, and particularly Jewish, converts to Islam. These
were later lumped together as Israelite tales with the attached label
“Do Not Use.” The warning came too late in most cases. The “Israelite
tales” from the People of the Book were an influential contribution
to the formulation of Islam in the first obscure century of
its existence.
The Making of a Muslim
Many if not most pre-Islamic Arabs practiced circumcision, and
though the Quran is silent on the subject, Muslims soon began to
understand it as a religious mandate, probably in imitation of the
Jews, just as Christians, with a little help from John the Baptist,
took over baptism from a Jewish conversion ritual. But despite the
Islamic (or Arab) affinity to Judaism, which some even saw as
tribal—their identification with “Ishmaelites” has already been
noted—Islam is more like Christianity in that it is not a kinship
society but a community of believers. Muslims too are made, not
born. The Quran could easily echo Paul’s sentiments that “there
was neither Greek nor Jew, slave or free, man or woman” among
the Muslims, but the social realities of seventh-century Mecca differed
from those of first-century Jewish Palestine. Muhammad
lived, whether in Mecca or Medina, in a combatively tribal society,
and in the Prophet’s preaching there is a good deal of space and
energy devoted to taking down that mind-set. The Muslim umma
was intentionally designed to replace a kinship society with a faithbased
one. The program was successful, at least during Muhammad’s
lifetime. The umma of the Muslims was in fact an egalitarian
society open to all believers, but only as long as the overwhelming
number of believers were Arabs, it soon appeared.
At God’s command, then, Muhammad founded a community
that took as its identity marker a submission (islam) to total monotheism,
an acceptance of Muhammad as the envoy of God and, in
consequence, of the Quran as God’s words. Though the Quran