"What do you think about Islam?" Postscript

I post this thread as a “New Topic” because I missed the deadline for posting in the original thread by about 30 minutes.

I share here every verse in the Qur’an that mentions the name “Jesus”.


In fact, contrary to the incorrect statement that I made in the first “What do you think about Islam” thread, there are other verses that are about Jesus but that do not include the name “Jesus” and, therefore, are not included in the list posted above. For a larger collection, see Jesus in Islam.

The verses that I quoted are from “The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary” by an Editorial Board consisting of:

  1. SEYYED HOSSEIN NASR (Editor-in-Chief), University Professor of Islamic Studies at the George Washington University, is an international authority on Islamic philosophy, mysticism, art, and science as well as comparative religion and religion and ecology.
  2. CANER K. DAGLI (General Editor), Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of the Holy Cross, is a specialist in Sufism, Islamic philosophy, interfaith dialogue, and Quranic studies.
  3. MARIA MASSI DAKAKE (General Editor) is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at George Mason University, specializing in Shiism, Sufism, Islamic philosophy and theology, the Quran, interfaith dialogue, and issues related to women and the feminine in classical Islam.
  4. JOSEPH E. B. LUMBARD (General Editor) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Arabic and Translation Studies at the American University of Sharjah and an Associate Editor
    for the Integrated Encyclopedia of the Qurʾān (in progress).
  5. MOHAMMED RUSTOM (Assistant Editor), Associate Professor of Islamic Studies at Carleton University, specializes in Sufism, Islamic philosophy and theology, and Quranic exegesis.
  • In my post in the original thread, I intended to focus on several specific verses in the list above and add what I believed was relevant and important commentary. As it happens, I didn’t and don’t intend to do so here. But I will say here, that only the most naive and uninformed theist, agnostic, or atheist would try to tell me that Islam’s Allah and Judaism or Christianity’s God are the same, regardless how many Muslim friends and authorities you know who have told you so. And Islam’s ʿĪsā ibn Maryam is most certainly NOT the New Testament’s Jesus.
  • I feel it incumbent on me to point out that:
    • al-Qurʼān literally means “the recitation”.
    • My understanding is that orthodox “Muslims believe that the Quran was orally revealed by God to … Muhammad through the Archangel [Gabriel]] … incrementally over a period of some 23 years, beginning in the month of Ramadan,when Muhammad was 40; and concluding in 632, the year of his death. {The same] Muslims regard the Quran as Muhammad’s most important miracle; a proof of his prophethood and the culmination of a series of divine messages starting with those revealed to Adam, including the … Tawrah (Torah), the … Zabur (Psalms), and the … Injil (Gospel”).
      The Quran is thought by [orthodox[ Muslims to be not simply divinely inspired, but the literal word of God. Muhammad did not write it as he did not know how to write. According to tradition, several of Muhammad’s companions served as scribes, recording the revelations. Shortly after the prophet’s death, the Quran was compiled by the companions, who had written down or memorized parts of it. Caliph Uthman established a standard version, now known as the Uthmanic codex, which is generally considered the archetype of the Quran known today. There are, however, variant readings with mostly minor differences in meaning. [Source: “Quran” in Wikipedia.]
    • I believe that that is why the Arabic version of the Quran is valued more than any translation and why mishandling a copy of it publicly and intentionally can get you hurt.
  • Consequently, IMO, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Islam theology is “replacement theology”, i.e. Islam is deemed to be a correction and replacement of Christianity, in the same way that orthodox Christianity is deemed to be a correction and replacement of Judaism and in the same manner that Baha’i endeavors to correct and replace Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. “Replacement theology”, or "Supersessionism is common in the history of religion.
  • It would seem to me that a person who believes that all religions that proclaim one God are equivalent and and equally true is confused by the differences between the multiple “Gods” that the monotheistic religions proclaim and, in purportedly “harmonizing” any two or more of the monotheistic religions, has manufactured a new religion.

Christianity degenerated as it institutionalized, ceasing to be radical long before becoming the state religion in the C4th. It exhausted itself in war with the pre-Islamic Persians, and them. Islam arose in the power vacuum of that exhaustion. Its radical vein of social justice seems to have run hotter than in Christianity, as shown now in Mozambique after the catastrophic failure all round of the Iraq crusade, the Arab Spring likewise. Islam seems to be an attempt to return to the faith once delivered as by the radical Jewish prophets, sweeping away degenerate Christianity in its early centuries. Its God is pure and ‘simple’. Its requirements just less than too much. It is certainly highly evolved in synch and tune with human evolution. Islam, like Confucianism, Hinduism, Russian Orthodox, are all here, with their languages, until the next ice age maximum. Folk Christianity will surge with the population in Africa, which is bad news for Islam which is always in the poor margins, which is bad news for everyone. Islam is a religion of the poor and the others will not address that, will not pursue righteousness aka social justice for Muslims.

  • Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdullāh ibn ʿAbdul-Muṭṭalib ibn Hāshim (born circa 570 C.E. - died 8 June 632) married his first wife, Khadījah bint Khuwaylid, when he was 25 years old (i.e and she was 40 years old, about 595 C.E.
  • Khadijah was born 555 C.E. and died 22 November C.E. 619.
  • Both Muhammad and Khadijah were born into successful families of a polytheistic, Arabic, mercantile tribe, the Quraysh, who inhabited and controlled the city-state of Mecca and it’s Ka’aba.
  • Muhammad was Khadijah’s third husband. Khadijah initially hired Muhammad to travel in a caravan to Syria. Pleased with his success, she eventually consulted her 1st cousin, Waraqah ibn Nawfal ibn Asad ibn Abd-al-Uzza ibn Qusayy Al-Qurashi and proposed marriage to Muhammad around 595 C.E.
  • Khadijah and Waraqah were, according to one account, Muhammad’s first cousins, twice removed.
  • I have read that marriage between Waraqah and Khadijah was proposed but never took place.
  • According to the Encyclopedia of Islam , Online ed., “Warqah bin. Nawfal”, Warqah was a Nestorian priest
  • Khadijah and Waraqah were the first to believe in Muhammad’s prophethood.
  • Muhammad was monogamous during Khadijah’s lifetime. (“Smart fellow”, IMO.)

I once had the amusing pleasure of witnessing an ex-“Christian” convert to Noahidism and an atheist son of devout Muslim parents, joining together in another forum to invite and mock silly efforts to answer the question: What did Jesus really do?. The Noahide pointed to Moses’ success story as a leader" and the atheist ex-Muslim pointed to Muhammad’s success story as a leader. The historical existence of Moses, Muhammad, and Jesus was assumed.

I can’t even follow half of this stuff.

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Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three great monotheistic religions, aka the three Abrahamic religions. Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship the God of Abraham. Of course, there are differences, some of them significant. For one thing, in Islam, Abraham is told to sacrifice Ishmael, not Isaac.

Many of the big players appear in all three religions; e.g. Adam, Abraham, and Moses.

Jesus does is not part of the Jewish religion. However, he figures prominently in Islam. You might be surprised to learn that Jesus (Isa to Muslims) is honored as a significant prophet, the son of the virgin Mary, and is even called the Messiah. However, Muslims do not believe in the Holy Trinity and reject the divinity of Jesus (That is a big thing in Christianity. A really big thing.) Furthermore, Muslims reject the idea that Jesus was crucified; they believe that God would never allowed one of his prophets to be killed. Also, the prophet Muhammad is considered to be the greatest prophet of all.

With its rejection of the divinity of Jesus, you can consider Islam to be a low Christology religion, along with Unitarianism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Way International, Christadelphians and so on. (I’ve wasted a lot of bandwidth on this site defending the doctrine of the Trinity.)

Anyway, an interesting point about the Qur’an is that it includes later stories about Jesus that appear only in the Christian apocryphal works, e.g. the story of Jesus making clay pigeons fly. Makes you wonder.

Another interesting story is that the Muslims accepted as sacred the Psalms of the Hebrew Scriptures for some time, before deciding they didn’t like them. [content removed.]

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Aw, c’mon. That’s intuitively obvious stuff.

Sorry. Islam is not supercessionist. It is reactionary to degenerate Christianity.

I think you would agree that, human nature being what it is, minority religions tend to align with the poor, whereas (as evidenced by degenerate caliphs and the Arab slave trade/ Mahdi struggle in the late 19th century),religions in power can become equally corrupt. Christianity and Islam are no exception.

In Mozambique, the poor suffer disproportionately as in most armed insurrections.

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I would. But Christianity is better, in evolutionary terms, at fooling its adherents to accept their lot. It is paradoxically more fatalistic in outcome than fatalistic Islam.

Ah! yet another irreconcilable difference between us.

What? That Islam is in eternally doomed reactionary conflict with Christendom; degenerate Christianity?

T: Proposition 1.
K: Not Proposition 1. Proposition 2.
T: Ah! yet another irreconcilable difference between us.
K: What? Proposition 3?
T: No, I haven’t addressed your Propositions 2 and 3. I stated Proposition 1, and you negated my Proposition 1. Ergo, the irreconcilable difference between us is between my Proposition 1 and your negation of my Proposition 1.

Kismet . . .

When the differences between each religion’s “God of Abraham” outnumber and outweigh the similarities between each religion’s “God of Abraham”, it may be time to acknowledge that Christians, Jews, and Muslims do not all worship the same “God of Abraham.” I did several years ago.

In fact, I’m not surprised by “the honor” given to Jesus. What did surprise me is that Islam’s Allah sent the angels to tell Mary that the name of her unborn baby isMessiah, Jesus, son of Mary.” That seemed very odd to me.

exactly.
Saudi Arabia didn’t outlaw slavery until the 1950s

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In that case, we should acknowledge that Christians have more than one “Gods of Abraham.”

Total and complete nonsense. Islam was in reaction to problems in a society with a diversity of pagan religions in a part of the world where Christianity remained a minority religion along with Judaism. This is perfectly obvious in the teachings of Islam which is ultra-hostile to paganism and not hostile to Christianity at all. The Quran distinguishes between monotheistic “people of the book” (Christianity and Judaism) and the polytheists which it calls idolators. The latter are treated with considerable enmity.

Frankly the biggest difference from Europe allowing Islam to develop in that part of the world was how Constantine made Christianity the state religion of the empire. Mecca is south of the empire under Constantine and the Roman empire well in decline even a century before the time of Mohammed.

What happened with Mohammed fits a pattern we see at other times in the history of Christianity, where other parts of the world imported their own specialized version of Christianity in order to filter out the cultural aspects of missionary Christianity. We see this in the beginning of Russian orthodoxy as well as in Korean Christianity. Mohammed simply made more changes to suit his tastes than did these others. It is likely true that trinitarian doctrine didn’t suit his campaign against paganism either.

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Boko haram.

You’re free, of course, and welcome to acknowledge whatever you please, However, I try to avoid acknowledging nonsense. Consequently, “we” won’t be doing any such thing.