Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THIS WORLD AND THE NEXT t 253
Salvation
The Sufis were attempting nothing other than to anticipate in this
life what every Muslim hoped for in the next. All monotheists
share the notion of salvation, which both Jews and Christians
parse as redemption, being saved from a parlous state, whereas
Muslims think of it in terms of an individual’s saving himself in a
morally neutral universe. God will judge, and those who have chosen
wickedness will be punished, while those who have chosen
the good will be rewarded, though always and everywhere there
hovers the question of predestination. But for the Christians and
Jews, redemption is quite a different matter. For Jews it is primarily
Israel that will be redeemed: God’s people will be freed at last of
the subjugation imposed on them by the hostile Gentile world. For
the Christian, incontrast, the emphasis rests heavily on individual
redemption. The individual has fallen under the subjugation of
sin—a legacy of Original Sin—and at the End Time will share at
last in the full redemptive act begun with Jesus’ death on the cross.
In Judaism and Islam, God simply grants salvation; in Christianity,
Jesus became the Redeemer by his sacrificial death. The Quran
does not cast the future hope of humankind in terms of either
redemption or salvation. What is promised is rather “prosperity”
(falah), a term that occurs often in the Quran and refers to success
in both this world and the next. Say your prayers, the Quran advises,
and “perhaps you will prosper” (62:10). Muhammad and
his followers are counseled to “strive”—the root is the same as
that of jihad—“with their possessions and themselves, for them
await good things: they are the prosperous ones” (9:88).
This form of salvation is not for Muslims alone. According to
the Quran (30:30), all humans are born with a sense of God’s
“original religion” (fitra), as it has been called. Fitra is a difficult
quranic word, but it appears clarified in a Prophetic tradition:
“Every infant is born according to the fitra, then his parents make
him a Jew or a Christian or a Zoroastrian.” Many thought this
meant that everyone comes into the world a Muslim, at least in the
sense that Abraham was, and then are “perverted” by parents into
other beliefs. If not gifted with revelation, one has but to look at