Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

14 t CHAPTER ONE
avoid ritual uncleanness and marriage with the Canaanites. Then,
at the end of the same passage, a crucial identification is made,
though almost certainly not for the first time. The sons of Ishmael,
and their cousins, the offspring of Abraham and another wife, Keturah,
with whom they intermarried, did indeed become a great
nation, as God had promised: they were the Arabs. Abraham sends
Ishmael and his offspring to settle “between Pharan and the borders
of Babylon, in all the land to the East, facing the desert. And
these mingled with each other, and they were called Arabs and
Ishmaelites” (Jubilees 20:11–13).
Both the name and the identification stuck, first among the Jews
and then among the Christians of the Middle East. The Middle
Easterners of the pre-Islamic era, the Arabs were either Ishmaelites
or Saracens, and even the latter word, whose actual origin is uncertain,
was parsed in biblical terms: “Saracen” came from “Sarah”
and the Greek kene, “empty” or “void,” thus “Sara-is-barren.”
None of this had anything to do with the origins of Islam, however.
The identification of the Arabs as Ishmaelites was strictly ethnic—everyone
knew the Arabs were polytheists—and it was an
ethnic identification based on a similarity of customs. One who
was not, apparently, aware of the identification was Muhammad.
Ishmael appears several times in the Quran, first as a somewhat
indistinct Hebrew prophet, and then, in the later chapters, he is
identified as Abraham’s son. But nowhere is it suggested or even
hinted at that Muhammad knew Ishmael was widely recognized
elsewhere as the ancestor of the Arabs. Nor is it ever asserted that
Islam’s claim to be the new version of the True Faith was based on
the Arabs’ blood descent from Abraham through Ishmael, as the
Jews’ was by their descent through Isaac and Jacob. Muslims are
not, in any event, the “Children of Ishmael.”
Abraham and Ishmael in Mecca
The Quran passes directly from Abraham’s conversion to God’s
command to construct the Kaaba (2:127). There is no mention in
the Muslim Scripture of Hagar or Sarah, nor of the Bible’s elabo-