Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

12 t CHAPTER ONE
ian holy land, however—not, at least, in the sense of a migration.
What Christian and Muslim devotion generated instead was, first,
a powerful desire to visit the places esteemed holy in that land—
the practice we call “pilgrimage”—and second, the more overtly
political wish to control those same holy places. In Western Christendom
this impulse led in the eleventh century to the first of the
Christian holy wars against Islam, the Crusades, and in Islam, to a
powerful Counter-Crusade under the famous hero Salah al-Din
(Saladin), who in 1187 retook Jerusalem and Palestine from the
Christian Franks. In both these events the land and its most celebrated
and sacred city mingled in the minds and motives of the
combatants, but it was Jerusalem that stood as a convenient and
moving symbol for what each side wished to possess for itself in
that holy land.
Hagar and Ishmael
To return to the Bible, it is his wife Sarai who in the opening verses
of Genesis 16 suggests to Abram that perhaps he can and should
father a son by her Egyptian slave-girl, Hagar. So indeed he does.
There is quickly, and perhaps inevitably, a falling-out between the
two women. Hagar flees and returns only after a divine apparition
promises that her son will have many descendants, though he himself
will ever be an outcast. At his birth this first son is called Ishmael;
Abram is by then eighty-six years old (Gen. 16:10–16).
Some thirteen years later, the Lord appears once more to Abram.
He repeats the promise of numerous heirs and a land to possess,
but now the promise is connected with a reciprocal act on Abram’s
part: as a sign of the covenant, he must circumcise all the males of
his household, kin and foreigner alike, the newborn on the eighth
day. It is on this occasion too that, in an act symbolizing the transformation
of their state—it happens often in these three communities—Abram’s
name is changed to Abraham and Sarai’s to
Sarah. Abraham is puzzled, however. He and his wife are far beyond
parenthood; perhaps it is Ishmael, after all, who will inherit