Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE WORSHIPFUL ACTS t 239
or theological restraints. Like the Passover haggadas, which are
readily altered by Reform Jews to reflect changing perceptions,
conditions, and needs—the Orthodox hew faithfully to a text
whose central core goes back to the ninth century—the taziyehs
vary greatly in their textual and dramatic presentation.
Islam and the Graven Image
Among the laws given to Moses on Sinai, one expresses a concern
about the Israelites’ use of “images.” “You shall not make for
yourself a sculpted image, or any likeness of what is in the heavens
above, or on the earth below, or in the waters under the earth,”
God says (Exod. 20:4–5), in what has come to be known as the
Second Commandment. The defiantly aniconic God of the Israelites
had good reason for his concern, as it turned out. Throughout
most of their history down to the Exile, the Israelites were
plagued with their penchant for idols and idol worship. The Bible
makes no effort to dissemble their attraction, from the golden bull
set up during Moses’ absence with the Lord on Sinai (Exod. 32:1–
10) to Jeroboam (1 Kings 12:28–31) and his successors as kings of
Israel making a similar cult the official policy of the state. How
seriously the problem was taken by some of God’s spokesmen
emerges clearly from this witheringly sarcastic attack on idols that
occurs in the forty-fourth chapter of Isaiah: “The makers of idols
all work to no purpose; and the things they treasure can do no
good, as they themselves can testify. They neither look nor think,
and so shall they be shamed” (9–10). Indeed, the Quran attributes
many of the same sentiments to Abraham (Quran 21:51–67), the
first to turn away from idols to the One True God. He upbraids his
idol-worshiping father and the rest of his family with the taunt
“Do you worship, besides God, these things that can do you neither
good nor harm?” (21:66; 26:73).
If the Israelites had an inclination toward idolatry, the Meccans
seemed to run and embrace it. The first generation of Muslims had
to explain how the Mecca that Abraham left in the hands of Ishmael
and his monotheistic progeny had become a pagan center of