Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

20 t CHAPTER ONE
with his father and his people about their idolatry. When Abraham
insults their gods, they say, “Build for him a building and fling him in
the red-hot fire. And they designed a trap for them but We made
them the undermost.” Then, without transition, the text turns to a
new topic, Abraham’s unnamed son: “We gave him glad tidings of a
son. And when he was old enough to work with him, he . . . [presumably
Abraham; the Quran is not always generous in identifying
its pronouns] said: ‘O dear son, I have seen in a dream that I must
sacrifice you. So look, what do you think?’ He said: ‘O my father, do
that which you are commanded. God willing, you will find me steadfast.’”
And then, “when they had both submitted (aslama),” God
tells Abraham that it was merely a test, and concludes, “And We
ransomed him with a momentous (azim) victim.”
The entire incident is a good example of the Quran’s allusive style.
The story is filled with spaces and moves uncertainly to its point—
“Thus do We reward the good”—stripping off all the biblical details
of time and place, the journey, the servants, the fuel, the altar, the ram
caught in the thicket, while adding the dream vision and his son’s
urging Abraham to do what he had to do. As it stands, the story is
comprehensible, but only barely so, and only if we assume that the
listeners already had, as we do, some idea of what was being talked
about. Two points are worth noting, however. One is that the text
does not say which son was being sacrificed, and the earliest Muslim
commentators on this quranic passage were uncertain whether it was
Isaac, as in the Bible, or Ishmael, as his importance in the Muslim
Abraham tradition seemed to require. Second, the Quran, unlike the
Bible’s account but in agreement with many later Jewish treatments
of the subject, makes that son, whether Isaac or Ishmael, both aware
and approving of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice him at God’s
command. His self-sacrifice was voluntary, as it was not in the Genesis
text but only in the later Jewish reading of that text.
The Jews in the Quran
The Quran betrays a deep ambivalence toward the Jews of history.
The Children of Israel were indeed the people whom God chose