years of fearful warfare, the city of Mecca
in the Arabian Hijaz voluntarily opened its gates to the
Muslim army. No blood was shed and nobody was forced to
convert to Islam, but the Prophet Muhammad ordered the
destruction of all idols and icons of the Divine. There were
a number of frescoes painted on the inner walls of the
Kabah, the ancient granite shrine in the centre of Mecca,
and one of them, it is said, depicted Mary and the infant
Jesus. Immediately Muhammad covered it reverently with
his cloak, ordering all the other pictures to be destroyed
except that one.
This story may surprise people in the west, who have
regarded Islam as the implacable enemy of Christianity
ever since the crusades, but it is salutary to recall it
during the Christmas season when we are surrounded by
similar images of the Virgin and Child. It reminds us that
the so-called clash of civilisations was by no means
inevitable. For centuries Muslims cherished the figure
of Jesus, who is honoured in the Qur'an as one of the
greatest of the prophets and, in the formative years of
Islam, became a constituent part of the emergent
Muslim identity.
There are important lessons here for both Christians
and Muslims - especially, perhaps, at Christmas. The
Qur'an does not believe that Jesus is divine but it
devotes more space to the story of his virginal
conception and birth than does the New Testament,
presenting it as richly symbolic of the birth of the
Spirit in all human beings (Qur'an 19:17-29; 21:91).
Like the great prophets, Mary receives this Spirit and
bears Jesus, who will, in his turn, become an ayah, a
revelation of peace, gentleness & compassion to the world.
The Qur'an is horrified by Christian claims that Jesus
was the "son of God", and depicts Jesus ardently
denying his divinity in an attempt to "cleanse" himself
of these blasphemous projections.
Time and again the Qur'an insists that, like Muhammad
himself, Jesus was a perfectly ordinary human being
and that the Christians have entirely misunderstood
their own scriptures. But it concedes that the most
learned and faithful Christians - especially monks &
priests - did not believe that Jesus was divine; of all
God's worshipers, they were closest to the Muslims (5:85-86).
It has to be said that some Christians have a very
simplistic understanding of what is meant by the
incarnation. When the New Testament writers - Paul,
Matthew, Mark and Luke - call Jesus the "Son of God",
they do not mean that he was God. They use the term
in its Jewish sense: in the Hebrew Bible, this title was
bestowed upon an ordinary mortal - a king, a priest or
a prophet - who had been given a special task by God
and enjoyed unusual intimacy with him. Throughout
his gospel, Luke is in tune with the Qur'an, because
he consistently calls Jesus a prophet. Even John, who
saw Jesus as God's incarnate Word, usually made a
distinction, albeit a very fine one, between the eternal
Word and God himself - just as our own words are
separate from the essence of our being.
The Qur'an insists that all rightly guided religions come
from God, and Muslims are required to believe in the
revelations of every single one of God's messengers:
"Abraham and Ishmael & Isaac and Jacob ... and all
the other prophets: we make no distinction between
any of them" (3:84). But Jesus - also called the
Messiah, the Word & the Spirit - had special status.
Jesus, it was felt, had an affinity with Muhammad,
and had predicted his coming (61:6), just as the
Hebrew prophets were believed by Christians to
have foretold the coming of Christ. The Qur'an,
possibly influenced by Docetic Christianity, denied
that Jesus had been crucified, but saw his ascension
into heaven as the triumphant affirmation of his
prophet hood. In a similar way, Muhammad had
once mystically ascended to the Throne of God.
Jesus would also play a prominent role beside
Muhammad in the eschatological drama of the last days.
During the first three centuries of Islam, Muslims
came into close contact with Christians in Iraq,
Syria, Palestine and Egypt, and began to amass a
collection of hundreds of stories and sayings
attributed to Jesus; there is nothing comparable
in any other non-Christian religion. Some of these
teachings were clearly derived from the gospel – the
Sermon on the Mount was particularly popular –
but were given a distinctively Muslim flavour.
Jesus is depicted making the hajj, reading the
Qur'an, and prostrating himself in prayer.
In other stories, Jesus articulated specifically
Muslim concerns. He was a great model for
Muslim ascetics, preaching poverty, humility
and patience. Sometimes he took sides in a
political or theological dispute: aligning himself
with those who advocated free will in the debate
about predestination; praising Muslims who
retired on principle from politics ("Just as kings
have left wisdom to you, so you should leave the
world to them"); or condemning scholars who
prostituted their learning for political advancement
("Do not make your living from the Book of God").
Jesus was becoming internalised by Muslims as an
exemplar and inspiration in their own spiritual quest.
Shias felt that there was a strong connection between
Jesus and their inspired imams, who had also had
miraculous births and inherited prophetic knowledge
from their mothers. The Sufis were especially devoted
to Jesus and called him the prophet of love. The 12th-
century mystic Ibn al-Arabi called him "the seal of the
saints" - deliberately pairing him with Muhammad, the
"seal of the prophets". Some Sufis went so far as to alter
the shahadah, the Muslim profession of faith, so that it
became: "I bear witness that there is no God but Allah,
and that Jesus [not Muhammad] is his prophet."
The Muslim devotion to Jesus is a remarkable example
of the way in which one tradition can be enriched by
another. It cannot be said that Christians returned the
compliment. While the Muslims were amassing their
Jesus-traditions, Christian scholars in Europe were
denouncing Muhammad as a lecher and charlatan,
viciously addicted to violence. But today both Muslims
and Christians are guilty of this kind of bigotry and
often seem eager to see only the worst in each other.
The Muslim devotion to Jesus shows that this was not
always the case. In the past, before the political
dislocations of modernity, Muslims were always able to
engage in fruitful and stringent self-criticism. This year,
on the birthday of the Prophet Jesus, they might ask
themselves how they can revive their long tradition of
pluralism and appreciation of other religions. For their
part, meditating on the affinity that Muslims once felt
for their faith, Christians might look into their own past
and consider what they might have done to forfeit this respect.
Dr.Karen Armstrong is the author of Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time |
