Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

THE PRINCE OF MEDINA t 73
fashion a religious retort, one that grew sharper, firmer, and more
confident in its details over Muhammad’s ten years in Medina.
Muhammad was the successor of the other prophets, to be sure,
and notably of Moses and Jesus. But he was not simply adding to
Judaism or Christianity—why didn’t he just become a Christian or
a Jew, some were asking; rather he was chosen for something far
more radical. Islam was a renewal of the pristine—and pre-Jewish—religion
of Abraham (Quran 2:135). Abraham, the Quran
pronounced triumphantly, came before both the Torah and the
Gospel (3:55–58); Abraham was, in fact, the first muslim, the first
submitter to God in absolute monotheism (2:127–134).
According to the standard Life, the first hundred verses of the
second chapter of the Quran were sent down on the occasion of
Muhammad’s break with the Jews during his first years in Medina.
We cannot say if that was really the case, but that sura is in fact the
Quran’s most extended meditation on the Jewish past and the
newly revealed Muslim present in God’s plan of salvation—the
Muslim scriptural parallel, though with very different rhetorical
techniques, to Paul’s letter to the Romans. Among its more startling
declarations was the already noted claim that Abraham and
his son Ishmael built the Kaaba in Mecca (2:125–127; 22:26) and
instituted the rituals of the hajj in Mecca and its environs (22:27–
30).
If it is true that Muhammad changed his qibla, or prayer direction,
from Jerusalem to Mecca during his first months in Medina,
linking Abraham with the shrine and rituals of his hometown reflects
an even more radical theological reorientation toward
Mecca. From the beginning Muhammad had identified the God he
worshiped with the “Lord of the Kaaba” (106:3), but behind the
pronouncements of the Medinan sura 2 lies the largely unarticulated
assumption that Mecca had once, in Abraham’s and Ishmael’s
day, been a settlement of monotheists whose rituals were directed
toward the worship of the One True God, and that in the
intervening centuries it had lapsed into the polytheism that Muslims
learned to called al-jahiliyya, or “the era of barbarism. We do
not know the extent to which these assumptions were shared by
the audience of the Quran, which never averts or explains them,