Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland
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“ AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS MESSENGER” t 59<br />
ment, but to warn the unbeliever that the price of doubt is high<br />
<strong>and</strong> the rewards of submission great. Though it has its own particular<br />
details, the Quran’s version of the End is obviously different<br />
from anything we encounter among the pre-<strong>Islam</strong>ic Arabs, but it is<br />
noticeably similar to that current among the <strong>Jews</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Christians</strong>.<br />
Moreover, in the face of that same opposition, the Quran begins to<br />
unfold its own elaborate history of prophecy. Muhammad, the<br />
Meccans were told, was not the first prophet sent to humankind,<br />
though assuredly he was the last.<br />
The Opposition<br />
The Quran is profoundly interested in history, not the history of<br />
Mecca, to be sure, or even of Arabia; not in politics or in the tribal<br />
skirmishes, the “days of the Arabs” so celebrated by Muhammad’s<br />
contemporaries. The Quran’s view of the past is a version of Sacred<br />
History, how the divine dispensation, which began at Creation,<br />
has unfolded from Adam down to the present. The story of<br />
the prophets is rehearsed at length in the Quran, never quite consecutively<br />
in the manner of a history, but rather to make a moral<br />
point, to wit, when humankind has refused to heed the bearers of<br />
God’s message, the consequences have been terrible. The lesson is<br />
clear: those who reject Muhammad will pay a fearsome price at<br />
God’s h<strong>and</strong>s.<br />
Thus Muhammad established his own pedigree in the essentially<br />
biblical line of the prophets (as a successor in particular of Moses<br />
<strong>and</strong> Jesus), <strong>and</strong> his Book, this “convincing Arabic Quran,” as it<br />
calls itself (36:69), took its place as an equal beside the sacred<br />
books of the <strong>Jews</strong> <strong>and</strong> <strong>Christians</strong>. Later, when <strong>Islam</strong> exploded into<br />
the populous habitats of those other communities, that claim to<br />
parity would take on meaning, but <strong>for</strong> Muhammad’s original audience<br />
in Mecca, the references to other prophets were chiefly intended<br />
as a warning to re<strong>for</strong>m <strong>and</strong> not as a prediction that a third<br />
great branch of monotheism had arisen out of the other two.<br />
The Quraysh were not moved by either the man or his message.<br />
They accused Muhammad of being jinn-possessed, a charge usu-