Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

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