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The Gospel According to Islam is an attractive little book that I was given some time ago. In it, Ahmad Shafaat presents the material about Isa (Jesus) which is to be found in the Qur’an in the style of one of the Synoptic Gospels. He supplements this with material from the Gospels, but only where such material fits the basic Islamic presuppositions about Jesus. Thus, the purification of Jesus, as told by St. Luke is included, but not the birth narratives, as there is already a rather different account of his birth in the Qur’an. Several of Jesus’ sayings are included, but no mention of the claim that he was Son of God.

The presuppositions of the Gospel According to Islam reflect Islam’s attitude to Judaism and Christianity. It is accepted that both religions are "Religions of the Book", but that where they differ from the teaching of Qur’an this is because Jews and Christians have corrupted the original message of their prophets. The claim is that Islam is the one true religion -- the eternal message of God to humanity, which has been declared by all past prophets, but which is now proclaimed again in its final and incorruptible form in the Qur’an. The claim is strikingly similar to that made for Jesus Christ at the beginning of the Epistle to the Hebrews -- a passage often read at the Christmas communion service.

It is understandable that believers will claim that theirs is the final truth. Absolute truth is often thought to be the concomitant of the total dedication that faith requires. There are those, however, today, with whom I sympathize, who question the possibility of absolute truth and who adopt a "pluralist" position which accepts that different faiths have particular insights into Truth, but that the Ultimate Divine Mystery is beyond full comprehension by the human mind.

Indeed, long ago the Sufis pointed to this transcendent unity of religion. The great Sufi mystic and original thinker Ibn (al-Arabi (1165-1240) wrote,

Dr Seyyed Hossein Nasr explains that the Sufi is one who seeks to transcend the world of forms, to journey from multiplicity to Unity, from the particular to the Universal. He leaves the many for the One and through this very process is granted the vision of the One in the many. For him all forms become transparent, including religious forms . . . Sufism or Islamic gnosis is the most universal affirmation of that perennial wisdom which stands at the heart of Islam and in fact of all religion as such. It is this supreme doctrine of Unity . . . that the Sufis call the "religion of love." This love is not merely sentiment or emotions, it is the realized aspect of gnosis. It is a transcendental knowledge that reveals the inner unity of religions.

The majority of Christians have claimed an absolute truth for their religion -- even for their branch of that religion. They should, therefore, be able to understand the traditional Muslim position. The question, however, we shall have to consider is whether this means that there will inevitably be a clash between followers of these two great religions.

It is possible to make the claim for final truth in an absolutist manner. For example, the Catholic Council of Florence in 1438-45 declared that "no one remaining outside the Catholic Church, not just pagans, but also Jews or heretics or schismatics, can become partakers of eternal life, but they will go to the "everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels", "unless before the end of life they are joined to the Church." A somewhat similar attitude is shown by the, perhaps apocryphal, reply of the second Caliph, Umar, to a question, after the Egyptian city of Alexandria was captured, about what to do with the great library there. He is reported to have replied, "If the books are in agreement with the Qur’an, they are unnecessary and may be destroyed; if they are not in agreement with the Qur’an, they are dangerous and should certainly be destroyed." In fairness to Caliph Umar it should be added that he permitted Jewish families to resettle in Jerusalem, despite protests from some Christians and that he personally supervised the cleansing of the Temple Mount.

A more irenic approach acknowledges that there is truth in other traditions, although the final truth is that of the tradition to which the believer himself belongs. Paul in Acts 14, 17, says that "God hath not left himself without witness" (AV) and many Christians today would adopt an "inclusivist" position which recognizes that God is revealed in all the great religions, but that God’s final definitive revelation is in Jesus Christ. In a similar way, many Muslims recognize the God’s has declared his will in past generations, but that the authoritative message is that given to the Prophet Muhammad. According to one of the Prophet’s sayings, every human being is a Muslim, in the sense that his or her true purpose is to serve God. "Every child is born in the fitrah (the natural state) and it is his parents who make him into a Jew or a Christian. Just as a camel is born whole -- do you perceive any defect?" In this context the word parents has the wider meaning of social influences or social environment. So, in the words of Professor Ismail al-Faruqi, ‘the historical religions are out growths of din al-fitrah, containing within them differing amounts or degrees of it."

It says also that "For every nation there is a messenger." Traditionally the number of prophets is said to be 124,000. Again it is stated, "Nothing is said to thee that was not said to the messengers before thee." (41, 43). Mention is made of Noah and Abraham and Moses and Jesus and other prophets (6, 84-86),

Since only some of God’s apostles are mentioned in the Qur’an (40, 78), the Buddha and the avatars of the Hindus are not necessarily excluded. Certainly the Qur’an denounces idolatry and Muslims when they reached India attacked idolatry verbally and then physically. But it is now recognized by some Muslim scholars that, like early Christian missionaries, the first Muslims did not understand role of ‘idols’ or ‘images’ in Hinduism. I once heard a lecture at a conference in Delhi by the African Muslim scholar Professor Dawud O S Noibi who said that the phrase ‘People of the Book’ is better translated as ‘followers of earlier revelations’, which is the term used by Muhammad Asad in his translation of the Qur’an. He stressed that the Qur’an teaches that God has sent every people a prophet and he suggested that Rama, Krishna and Zoroaster might be seen as prophets of Allah. Later on the same day as I had heard the lecture, I visited the great Jama Masjid in Old Delhi. The guide mentioned that Islam teaches that every people has been sent a prophet, such as Moses or Jesus or Krishna or Rama or Zoroaster. Perhaps the Professor from Africa was only acknowledging what many Muslims who have lived for centuries in a religiously plural society have known for a long time.

The Qur’an makes a number of references to Isa (Jesus) and also refers to John the Baptist and Mary. Geoffrey Parrinder was right when he said that ‘the Qur’an gives a greater number of honorable titles to Jesus than to any other figure of the past.’ Jesus is mentioned in 93 verses, although Job or Aiybu is mentioned in over 200 verses. Ibrahim (Abraham) and Musa (Moses) are also given great importance. Jesus is always regarded with reverence by Muslims, who add, "May God bless him", whenever they mention his name. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr says, "For the Muslim, within the firmament of Islam, in which the Prophet is like the full moon, the other great prophets and saints are like stars which shine in the same firmament, but they do so by the grace of Muhammad - upon whom be peace. A Muslim can pray to Abraham or Christ, not as Jewish or Christian prophets, but as Muslim ones, and in fact often does so, as seen in the popular "prayer of Abraham" in the Sunni world and the Du’a-yi warith in Shi’ite Islam. This respect for those of other faiths was shown by the Prophet himself who when a delegation of sixty Orthodox Christians of Najran came to make a pact with the Prophet, were received by Muhammad in the Mosque. He allowed the Christians to pray there, which they did facing East. It is on this occasion that the revelation was received which says: "The similitude of Jesus before Allah is as that of Adam."(3, 59).

The Qur’an speaks of the Virgin birth and of Jesus’ miracles and teaching. There is also an appeal by God that Christians should return to the proper path of faith and cease to exaggerate the status of Jesus. But, as I said at the beginning, where the Qur’an and the Bible disagree, the Bible has to be wrong, because the Qur’an is God’s final revelation. As Imam Abdul Jalil Sajid says, "For us Muslims, the only true version can be the Qur’anic account." He speaks, however, of the confusion caused for young Muslims by school celebrations of the nativity. He recounts that a few years ago a teacher in a Madrasa (religious school) asked his students whether they thought that Jesus was the Son of God. Most of the children in the class put up their hands to indicate that they thought he was.

The Qur’an accepts the "Virgin Birth" of Jesus. It is easy for God to do this as God can accomplish his purposes in the way he wishes ( 19, 21; 45, 7). But it is made clear that Jesus is the son of Mary, a sign to men and a mercy from God, but not the "Son of God."

The Qur’an always refers to Jesus in respectful terms. He is called a ‘sign’, a ‘mercy’, a ‘witness’ and an ‘example’. He is called by his proper name and by the titles Messiah and Son of Mary and by the names Messenger, Prophet, Servant, Word and Spirit of God. The Qur’an, however, as we have seen, denies the doctrine of the Trinity and rejects the belief that God had a Son. There are many Qur’anic denunciations of the idea that God has male or female offspring or has acquired a son, but at least some of these should probably be taken as referring to pagan gods and goddesses. There are three clear denials of Jesus’ divinity.

Muslims deny the divinity of Jesus because they reject all idea of God’s physical paternity, which, of course, Christians also reject. They also think that the teaching of the incarnation threatens the unity of God, although the doctrine of the Trinity is intended by Christians to guard against this danger.

In part the disagreement is a matter of language and of a failure to go beyond what is said to what is meant. Many Christians react with defensiveness and even hostility if someone denies that Jesus is the Son of God. But perhaps Christians are not always aware that the language can be misleading. As the American Catholic theologian Monika Hellwig has said ‘The serious and apparently intractable difficulties in Christology begin in a simplification in Gentile context and language of the elusive Hebrew way of speaking about the mystery of God and of God’s dealings with creation and history.’ In my book Christian-Jewish Dialogue, I suggested that the early Christians were cautious about speaking of Jesus as God and that "it could be said of second-century Christology that Christ was still the incarnate Logos, God’s revelation become flesh and blood. Christ was not yet the third person of the Trinity." In time, the teaching that God is Three Persons in One God came to be understood in a way that increased the distance between Jews and Muslims, on the one hand, and Christians on the other. In the book, I also asked whether there is other language which will more effectively communicate what Christians really believe. "To communicate the mystery of God’s presence in Jesus Christ today may mean starting again, as the language of the creeds may be a hindrance rather than a help. . . It is the living experience of faith behind the formularies that we need to discover. True Christian continuity is in sharing that experience, not in repeating ancient catch-phrases. We can affirm the reality of God in Jesus Christ without a particular time-bound metaphysic."

A few Muslims have also suggested that some of the difficulty is a matter of language. Sayyid Ahmad Khan tried to understand the language in its historical setting. ‘In the Western world, ‘father" is a term applied to the originator of something . . . the son is he whom God has formed with his hands. . . If we would express it in Arabic idiom then father means rabb (Lord) and "son" al-’abd al-maqbul (the chosen servant) and these meanings agree exactly with the application of these terms in the Old and New Testaments’. With reference to ‘Son of God’, he says, Amongst the Greeks it was commonly held that a very holy and reverenced person should be called "Son of God" . . . When the disciples intended to spread the Christian religion by means of the Greek language they had to give Christ such a title of honor.

The Persian writer Shin Parto, in his life of Jesus, Seven Faces, writes, "Christians say that Jesus is Son of God, but it is better to call Him Son of Love, one who was born in love, taught men love and was crucified for love and liberty." The Egyptian Khalid M. Khalid quotes the Gospel titles ‘Savior of the world’ and ‘Bread of Life’ and speaks of God as ‘Father’ and says ‘God is love.’ In a review of Kenneth Cragg’s The Call of the Minaret , M. Hamidullah wrote that "Muslims also admit the exalted position of Jesus, who saw with the eyes of God, talked with the tongue of God, and was absorbed (fana) in God, a position which is not incompatible with his not being God but remaining a man, a very exalted man." As we have seen, Muslim devotion also gives an exalted position to Muhammad whilst insisting that he too remained a man.

Professor S. Vahiduddin, of the Indian Institute of Islamic Studies in New Delhi, gave me an article of his "What Christ Means to Me." He wrote that "the vision of Christ in Muslim experience is indelibly associated with the Virgin Mother and consequently he is referred to as Ibn Maryam, not only in the prophetic tradition but in secular literature. The Qur’an accords pre-eminence to the Virgin Mary among the women of creation." Professor Vahiduddin, having drawn attention to Jesus Christ’s miracles and healing touch, went on to say, "Christ reflects in every act of his God’s Jamal in all its fullness; in other words He is the embodiment of that tender aspect of the divine which the Qur’an calls rahma. And this is what Rudolf Otto calls mysteriosum fascinosum. The Muslim scripture is fully alert to this aspect of Christ’s life and bears witness to the fact that it is in virtue of Christ’s tender disposition that God "instilled soft-heartedness and mercy in the hearts of those who followed him (57, 27)."’

In rejecting the divinity of Jesus, Muslims also, as we have seen, reject the doctrine of the Trinity. Here, however, especially language more than content seems to be in dispute. Geoffrey Parrinder argues that ‘although commentators have taken its words as a rejection of orthodox Christian doctrine, it seems more likely that it is heretical doctrines that are denied in the Qur’an.’ Parrinder refers to the heresy of Patripassianism that so identified Christ and God as to suggest that God the Father had suffered on the cross. There seems also to have been a tendency by some to treat Christ and Mary as separate gods - teaching rejected by the Qur’an ( 4, 169/171).

Both religions speak of a God who is in relation to the created world and to humanity, rather than a remote Deity. In his Call of the Minaret, Kenneth Cragg suggested that when Christians speak of ‘God the Son’ they mean ‘God in the act of revelation.’ To this, S. M. Tufail, who was a good friend to me in my early years with the World Congress of Faiths, replied that "the change of persons into attributes is nothing which is derogatory to the internal character of God." Here is a discussion which needs to be pursued by theologians. At least it suggests that Christians and Muslims could come closer in understanding and in their witness to the One God.

The other main area of dispute is about the death of Jesus. Traditional Muslim teaching is that the Jews (not the Romans!) tried to kill Jesus, but were unable to do so. God would not let the Messiah suffer a shameful death so it was only in appearance that Jesus was crucified. In reality, he was raised to the presence of God. This denial is out of respect for Jesus who is regarded as a prophet. It reflects the dominant Muslim view which we have already discussed that God’s cause is guaranteed ultimate success in this world

The key passage, in Richard Bell’s translation of the Qur’an is:

There are various translations of the phrase that Bell translates as ‘he was counterfeited for them.’ One reads ‘it appeared to them as such’; another as ‘only a likeness of that was shown to them.’ Sometimes it is suggested that someone else was substituted for Jesus -- perhaps Simon of Cyrene or Judas or Pilate -- and was crucified in his place. Similar suggestions were already current in some apocryphal gospels. It has also been suggested that Jesus fell into a coma and revived. One heretical sect claims that Jesus after his eventual death died and was buried in Kashmir. The orthodox Muslim view is that Jesus was a true servant of God and that no one could kill the soul. A note in the Saudi Arabian translation observes ‘The end of the life of Jesus on earth is as much involved in mystery as his birth. . . It is not profitable to discuss the many doubts and conjectures among early Christian sects and among Muslim theologians.’

Muslims also reject Christian teaching about the Atonement. Ulfat Aziz-us-Samd in his Comparative Study of Christianity and Islam says the doctrine is unsound for three reasons. Man is not born in sin; God does not require a price to forgive the sinner and the idea of a vicarious sacrifice is unjust and cruel. Further, the Qur’an says that no one can take upon himself or herself the sins of another person, because each person will be rewarded or punished according to his or her deserts. In part, I agree with him, and by no means all Christians accept the substitutionary theory of the atonement which holds that Jesus’ blood paid the price which humans deserved to pay for their sins. Traditional theories of the atonement stress the objective work of Christ that by his sacrifice the relationship of God and humankind has been changed. Some modern Christians hold, as I do myself, to a more subjective view and say that the Cross shows up the nature of human sin and evil and reveals more powerfully than any other event the nature of God as self-giving love. It is a message that can transform a person’s self-understanding and their relationship to God.

A few Muslim writers have tried to go beyond disputes about what happened to Jesus on the cross to reflect upon the meaning of his passion, thereby opening up a new and potentially fruitful area of discussion between Muslims and Christians.

In his book City of Wrong, Dr Kamel Hussein says that ‘God raised him [Jesus] unto Him in a way that we can leave unexplained among the several mysteries which we have taken for granted on faith alone. Dr Hussein rejects the idea of a substitute and recognises that the intention of the Jews was to kill Jesus. For Dr Kamel Hussein, the meaning of the crucifixion is not dependent on what actually happened. The City of Wrong is Jerusalem which stands for all humankind. The events of Good Friday illustrate what happens when people sin against their conscience. The book ends with the words, "He was the light of God upon the earth. The people of Jerusalem would have nothing to do with him except to extinguish the light. Whereupon God has darkened the world around them."

Professor Vahiduddin also writes with sympathy of the events of Good Friday.

What greater ignominy and disgrace is there which Christ has not been made to suffer. But here it is that Christ appears in all his glory, and the world and all that it stands for is exposed in all its vanity. Whether we see the end and the culmination of his earthly course in the Christian or the Muslim perspective, death is not allowed to prevail and Christ appears to be ascending to supreme heights defying death. Perhaps it is due to my Muslim background that what strikes me most is not the suffering through which he passes but his triumph through suffering.

What looks like defeat, subjection to mortality, the brute success of worldly power and of hard-headed priesthood lose their relevance. Death is vanquished once for all, Christ’s life serves as a beacon to those who are laid low, who "labor and are heavy laden" (Matthew 11, 28). Whenever attempts are made to conceptualize that which by its own nature passes all understanding, interminable controversies and disputes arise. But Christ remains an unphenomenon which will defy conceptualization.

Such attempts by Muslims sympathetically to enter into the meaning of the cross are still rare. Yet if our emphasis is more on the meaning of the death of the Cross than on historical questions about what actually happened, there is room for Christians and Muslims to bring new insights to each other and to co-operate in the relief of suffering.

Professor Vahiduddin ends his brief article in this way:

And how else can we help God, poor mortals as we are, but to promote good and to resists evil and to illumine our life with that all over-riding love which embraces friends and foes alike.

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[Editor’s note: The original manuscript contains no reference numbers for the following notes:]

"What is Muhammad’s religious significance for Christians?" was the theme of a conference that I arranged through the World Congress of Faiths. It was led by Bishop Kenneth Cragg, who has an expert and personal knowledge of Islam.

Muslims, as we shall see in a later chapter, regard Jesus as a prophet and are often resentful that Christians do not reciprocate the compliment, although I am happy to speak of Muhammad as a prophet. Ulfat Aziz -us-Saud, complains that "While Muslims believe in Jesus Christ as a true prophet and love and respect him . . . Christians not only reject Muhammad, but are never tired of speaking about him and his religion in the most disparaging manner possible. They declare him to be a victim of hallucination, or even of epilepsy. They attribute unworthy motives to him and claim to find many faults in his character and in his private and public life."

Early Christian accounts of Muhammad’s life were usually derogatory. Christians in the past have spoken of Muhammad as a heretic, with a false or inadequate understanding of God. He was depicted as a war-like aggressor or as promiscuous because he had several wives, although some marriages were partly for diplomatic alliances. He was even called ‘Mahout’ or the spirit of darkness. The great Christian poet Dante placed Muhammad in the inferno, torn to pieces by pigs. Luther regarded Muhammad and the Pope as the two arch-enemies of Christ. In the twentieth century, H G Wells said Muhammad was a man "whose life on the whole was by modern standards unedifying." Some recent comments in the media have been little better.

Some Christians, however, have written quite objective accounts of Muhammad’s life and teaching. One of the first British writers to attempt a more sympathetic portrait was Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), who saw Muhammad as a genuine hero among the prophets. F. D. Maurice (1805-72) in his lectures on Islam was not entirely unsympathetic. The twentieth century saw many more scholarly accounts of Muhammad’s life and times, although the critical presuppositions of some scholars were unacceptable to Muslims.

Few even of the best accounts of Muhammad’s life discuss the religious significance of Muhammad for those who are Christian. The study of religions which as an academic discipline developed quite quickly during the twentieth century stressed the need for neutrality and impartiality. The phenomenological approach took seriously the faith of the believer and tried to appreciate a religion from the standpoint of its adherents. In arranging the World Congress of Faiths conference I felt that an interfaith group could perhaps go further and try to discuss the religious significance of one faith to members of another. The revelation of the Qur’an is in intention a universal message addressed to all people. Can those who belong to another household of faith also hear in it a word of God?

A rather similar question is whether non-Muslims should speak about the "Prophet" Muhammad. For me as a Christian, Muhammad is not the Prophet or the seal of the prophets. Yet, I believe that his was a genuine encounter with God and that his was a prophetic message, akin to that of the great Biblical prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah.

In this I agree with W. Montgomery Watt who gave rather more extended arguments. He wrote, "Muhammad claimed to receive messages from God and conveyed these to his contemporaries. On the basis of these messages a religious community developed, claiming to serve God, numbering some thousands in Muhammad’s lifetime, and now having several hundred million members. The quality of life in the community has been on the whole satisfactory for the members. Many men and women in this community have attained to saintliness of life, and countless ordinary people have been enabled to live decent and moderately happy lives in difficult circumstances. These points lead to the conclusion that the view of reality presented in the Qur’an is true and from God, and that therefore Muhammad is a genuine prophet.’

Keith Ward, who is Regius Professor of Theology at Oxford, has written, "Christians can see Muhammad as truly inspired by God, as called to proclaim a strict monotheistic faith, and as chosen by God for that purpose. In seeing him thus, they can place him on the same level as all the prophets of Israel and the apostles of the early Christian church. It may even be possible to place him, from an authentically Christian viewpoint, on the same level as Jesus, insofar as prophet-hood is concerned (remembering that, for Christians, Jesus is ‘more than a prophet’). In other words, a Christian can see Muhammad as inspired in the same sense as Jewish and Christian prophets, and thus accord him the highest honor as a true prophet. Nevertheless, they would in this still fall short of the Muslim perception that Muhammad was uniquely chosen to utter the definitive and unquestionable words of God himself."

So I use the title "Prophet" of Muhammad partly as a sign of my reverence for him and partly out of respect for the religious convictions of those who are Muslim.

Underlying this approach is my conviction that there is One God who has spoken in various ways through the great religious traditions. While, in my view, there is a transcendent unity of faiths, there is also considerable difference and variety. In part this is because people’s apprehension of and response to the divine is varied, especially because of cultural and historical differences, but also each tradition emphasizes certain central truths. We need to listen to these and see how, if we belong to a different faith community, they illuminate or challenge the convictions that we already hold.

So the approach of the conference was to try to hear the message Muhammad recited and to listen in it for a word of God to those of another community of faith. His emphasis on the Oneness of God and the rejection of idolatry is perhaps a corrective to those forms of Christianity which so focus on Jesus as almost to forget the Father. Orthodox Christian worship is not primarily worship of Jesus but worship of God through Jesus Christ. Islam too, as I have suggested, can remind Christians of the glory and holiness of God.

There is now considerable scholarly agreement about the main events in Muhammad’s life. He was born in 570 CE. at Mecca, which was a busy commercial center in Arabia with a near monopoly of the entrepot trade between the Indian ocean and the Mediterranean. Muhammad was of the family Banu Hashim in the tribe of the Quraysh. He was born after the death of his father and became ward of his grandfather, Abd al-Muttalib. At an early age he had an experience of a visitation by two figures -- later identified as angels -- who "opened his chest and stirred their hands inside". It was the first of several unusual experiences that led Muhammad increasingly to search for the truth of God and religion on his own. This quest was strengthened when he was employed by a widow, called Khadijah, to take trading caravans north to Syria. There he met Christians and Jews, especially the monk Bahira who recognized in him the signs of the promised Messiah. By now Muhammad was under the protection of his uncle Abu Talib. At the age of 25, he married Khadijah. They had two sons who died young and four daughters. Muhammad was increasingly influenced by the Hanifs, who sought to preserve a monotheism which they traced back to Ibrahim (Abraham). The people of Mecca, however, were polytheistic and worshipped idols. Increasingly, Muhammad went by himself to a cave on Mount Hira. It was there that he had the strong sense of a presence, later identified with Gabriel, to which we have already referred.

At first Muhammad thought he was possessed, but as he fled the cave and was half way down the mountain, he heard a voice saying to him, "O Muhammad, thou art the messenger of God and I am Gabriel." On his return home, with a still quaking heart, he said to Khadijah "Cover me, cover me." Khadijah went to tell her cousin Waraqh, who was old and blind, Waraqh, who was a Christian, exclaimed that the angel of Revelation who had come to Moses had now come to Muhammad. A further divine revelation reassured Muhammad. After further revelations, he began preaching, but met strong opposition. He was clear that if God is God and God is One, then there cannot be a Christian God and a Jewish God and certainly not the many deities of Mecca. He was also convinced that the idolatry of Mecca had to be swept away. For Muhammad there was only One God from whom all creation derived. Therefore all human beings should live in a corresponding unity (umma). Islam is the attempt to realize this unity under God.

After his wife Khadijah and his cousin Ali and his slave Zayd, whom the Prophet set free, the first believer was Abu Bakr. They were called al-muslimun or Muslims, those who enter into a condition of safety because of their commitment to God.

Opposition and persecution increased. But then, Muhammad was invited to Yathrib -- soon to be known as Madina -- to make his way of unity a practical reality by reconciling the town’s two rival ruling families. He made this move, known as the Hijara, which means emigration and breaking the bonds of kinship, in 622, a date which was to become the first year of the Muslim calendar. There under the guidance of fresh revelations from God he began to establish a community. These revelations were clearly distinct from the words that Muhammad spoke as an ordinary human being. It is said that his appearance changed and the style of utterance, which was rhythmic and with a loose pattern of rhyme, was different to his normal speech.

At Madina, Muhammad was joined by some seventy other emigrants, the Muhajirun. Opposition from Mecca continued, partly because Muhammad raided some of their caravans. In 624 the Muslims defeated a much larger Meccan army at the battle of Badr, but in the following year the battle of Uhud, in which the Prophet was injured, was inconclusive, largely because the archers disobeyed their orders because they were too eager for booty. In 627 the Quraysh failed in their attempt to besiege Madina. Then in 630, Muhammad captured Mecca and purified it from idols. Besides these military engagements, Muhammad both organized the pattern of life in Madina and built up relations with neighboring tribes.

Muhammad died two years after his return to Mecca. He had often spoken of Paradise and according to his wife A’ishah, his last words were, "With the supreme communion in Paradise, with those upon whom God hath showered His favor, the prophets and the saints and the martyrs and the righteous, most excellent for communion are they." (4, 69).

Despite his various marriages, Muhammad had no surviving son. His nearest relation was his cousin Ali, who had married one of his daughters, but the majority of the community chose as his successor Abu Bakr, who was one of his first followers. There were those, however, who thought that Ali should have been his successor and within a generation of Muhammad’s death, this lead to the division of Islam between Sunni and Shi’a, which persists to this day.

Almost immediately after Muhammad’s death, Abu Bakr (d. 634) who was to become the first Caliph, declared, "If any of you have been worshipping Muhammad, let him know that Muhammad is dead. But if you have been worshipping God, then know that God is eternal and never dies." He quoted the verse:

"Muhammad is no more

Than a Messenger: many were the Messengers that passed away

Before Him" (3, 144). Muhammad is not regarded as superhuman nor divine nor without sin. He was commanded in the Qur’an: "Say: "I am but a man like yourselves, (but) the inspiration has come to me, that your God is One God." (18, 110).

Nonetheless Muhammad is special and is sometimes called insan al-kamil, the Perfect man -- much as Christians think of Jesus in his humanity as the perfect human being. He is regarded as the Exemplar and first living commentary on the meaning of the Qur’an and how to apply it to daily life. He had a particular intensity of communion with God. Countless stories, hadith, were told about him and his sayings and actions inform the mind of the Muslim.

Constance Padwick who made a careful study of Muslim Prayer Manuals that were in common use, wrote, "No one can estimate the power of Islam as a religion who does not take into account the love at the heart of it for this figure. It is here that human emotion, repressed at some points by the austerity of the doctrine of God as developed in theology, has its full outlet -- a warm human emotion which the peasant can share with the mystic. The love of this figure is perhaps the strongest binding force in a religion which has so marked a binding power."

The scholar and active inter-faith worker Irfan Ahmad Khan explains the ‘unique status’ of the Prophet. ‘Being a human, the Prophet shares all those limitations which human beings necessarily have and from which God alone is free. However, in the following sense the Prophet is infallible;

With the Prophet’s death, revelation came to an end. No one inherited Muhammad’s infallibility as the mouthpiece of God. Irfan Ahmad Khan makes entirely clear that "it is a very serious mistake to consider the Qur’an which is Revealed Guidance in Divine Words as the Prophet’s words." Great attention is paid to the sayings of the Prophet but they do not have the same authority as the Divinely revealed message of the Qur’an. It is interesting that St. Paul in writing about marriage distinguishes between the command of the Lord and his own instruction. He writes to the Corinthians: "To the married I give this command (not I, but the Lord) . . . To the rest I say this (I, not the Lord)’ (I Corinthians 7, 10 and 12). Later in the chapter Paul writes, "Now about virgins: I have no command from the Lord, but I give a judgement as one who by the Lord’s mercy is trustworthy."

Great authority, therefore, attaches to the sayings of Muhammad, but as Dr Irfan Ahmad Khan makes clear, Muhammad’s directions are not independent of the Book, but its interpretation and amplification. For example, whatever the Prophet says about Ramadan should be seen as explaining the Qur’anic instruction given it: "so whosoever observes the month, should fast during it." (2, 183ff).

It is not, however, just a question of authority, but of deep devotion. Constance Padwick in her book Muslim Devotions quotes one of the prayers that a Muslim pilgrim might say standing before the Tomb of the Prophet at Madina: "I bear witness that you are the apostle of God. You have conveyed the message. You have fulfilled the trust. You have counseled the community and enlightened the gloom and shed glory on the darkness, and uttered words of wisdom." Ezedine Guellouz’s account of his pilgrimage to the Prophet’s tomb is simpler, but just as moving. After praying in the Prophet’s Garden, he writes, "then we resume our progress (from East to West) towards the room where the Prophet’s tomb is. A simple greeting. "Peace be upon you, O Prophet", and the mercy and blessing of God!" Nothing more than one might say to a friend. One is advised not to raise one’s voice, not to bow, not to make any gesture of greeting towards the screen, nor towards the grille, still less to kiss them, or to pray in their direction. All the religious books stress these points. On the other hand, there is no reason why one should not pray God to bless Muhammad and to reward him for all that he did in the service of God and for the salvation of Mankind. "We can also convey to the Prophet the greetings of those who have asked us to do so. . ."

Every Muslim longs to hear, at death, the words:

(To the righteous soul Will be said:) "O (thou) soul, In (complete) rest And satisfaction! Come back thou to thy Lord.

Well pleased (thyself) And well-pleasing Unto Him!

Enter thou, then, Among my Devotees! Yea, enter thou My Heaven. (89, 26-30).

Constance Padwick remarks that Islam has to be ever on its guard against what may be a tacit, though never explicit, deifying of the Prophet. Perhaps the devotion offered by some Christians to the Blessed Virgin Mary may be a parallel. The theological question about when veneration becomes worship need not detain us. The important point here is for Christians to be aware of the deep love that faithful Muslims have for the Prophet "Peace be upon him." Christians need to learn more about Muhammad so as to dispel inherited and lingering prejudice.

Initially Muhammad put up with great courage with the abuse and persecution heaped upon him. Even when odiously reviled he did not answer back. Once when he was in prostration in the courtyard of the Ka’aba, some one placed the entrails of a camel over his shoulders, but he continued in his prayers until his daughter came and removed them so that he could get up. He remained constant in his faith during long years of frustration. Although regular prayer and an annual fast is required of Muslims, the Qur’an says:

So woe to the worshippers who are neglectful of their Prayers. Those who (want but) to be seen, but refuse (to supply) (Even) neighborly needs. (107, 4-7).

The Qur’an stresses the importance of giving thanks to God for the gifts of life, for the rich provision of nature,(6, 98-99) for blessings of life, such as hearing and sight and sleep:

Muhammad himself was a man of deep prayer and besides the five required times of prayer would spend much other time in prayer. He was also a person of great compassion. There are many stories of his kindness to animals. I like the one of the occasion when he came into a house and put down his cloak. Whilst he was talking, a mother cat and her kittens settled on the cloak. Rather than disturb the cats, Muhammad took a knife and cut round them leaving the cats part of his cloak.

Despite all the scorn and hatred, the hardship and suffering, in the moment of victory Muhammad granted a general amnesty and chose the way of reconciliation. Prophet showed great skill in diplomacy and his truthfulness was recognized.

As this prayer shows, Muhammad united in himself love for God and love for other people:

W. Montgomery Watt spoke of Muhammad’s three great gifts. First, his gift as a seer or prophet; secondly, his wisdom as a statesman and thirdly his skill and tact as an administrator. The more I read of his life, the more my respect for Muhammad grows.

When A’ishah, his favorite wife, was asked what sort of character the Prophet possessed, she answered, "Have you not read the Qur’an? . . .Truly the character of the Prophet was the Qur’an."

Should the chapter on the Qur’an or on Muhammad come first? I have put the Qur’an first as it is for Muslims the Word of God and Muhammad’s importance lies primarily in his role as messenger.

One day, when Muhammad was worshipping in the cave to which he was in the custom of retiring, he sensed a presence with him. It said to him, ‘Recite’ but he replied, ‘I am not able to recite.’ The presence then seized him and clasped him to his bosom and again said, ‘Recite.’ This happened three times; then the presence released Muhammad telling him:

Proclaim! (or Read!) In the name of thy Lord and Cherisher, Who created man, out of a leech-like clot: Proclaim! And thy Lord is most bountiful, He who taught (The use of) the Pen, Taught man that which he knew not. (96: 1-5).

When Muslims affirm that Muhammad is God’s Prophet, this is the same as saying that his revelations really are from God -- his message is the authentic voice of God. This is why also Muslims object to being called "Muhammad" a term which used to be in quite common use.

For Muslims, the Qur’an is ultimate truth. Even to look on the Scripture with the reverence of a true believer constitutes, for devout Muslims, an act of worship to God. The Qur’an is God’s speech, an eternal attribute existing within God’s essence and sharing God’s uncreatedness. Muslims handle the Holy Book with reverence and should perform ablutions, (wudu) so as to be in a state of ritual purity before reading the scripture. The importance of calligraphy in the Muslim world also reflects the high dignity of the Qur’an. Not only in texts but also on buildings the elaboration of the visible word became a major art form, especially as representation of the human figure was not allowed lest it lead to idolatry.

Only the Arabic text is in the proper sense the Qur’an. This is a major reason why most Muslims, wherever they live, learn Arabic, as I was reminded when I visited the remote Muslim community at the end of the old Silk Route in Xi’an in China. This also helps to maintain the unity of the umma or community of all Muslims. The Qur’an has been translated into numerous languages, and at the Hamdard University in New Delhi, I was shown some of the early translations into Indian languages. Translations are, in effect, only commentaries.

The sounds of the Arabic, it has been said, "have become like the body and the dwelling-place for the divine wisdom and divine wisdom has become like the soul and spirit of the sounds." Neal Robinson tries to illustrate this for English-speaking readers by comparing his translation of Mohammed’s initial revelation (96, 1-4) with a transliteration of the Arabic. His English version is :

The transliteration is: iqra’ bismi rabbi-ka ‘l-ladhi khalaq khalaqa ‘l-insana min ‘alaq iqra’ wa-rabbu-ka ‘l-akram al-ladhi ‘allama bi-’l’qalam ‘allama ‘l-insana ma lam ya’lam.

It is at once clear that the original is characterized by rhyme and the whole Qur’an is either rhymed or assonance prose. The subdivisions of the surahs or chapters into ayahs or verses are on the basis of assonance. Although the verses are of unequal length, there is a marked rhythm.

The Qur’an is intended to be recited and during Ramadan, the month of fasting, Muslims go in large numbers to a mosque to hear extensive recitations of the Qur’an. In the course of a month, they would hear the whole Qur’an. There are usually recitations from the Qur’an also before or after the Friday congregational prayers. Muslims are encouraged to memorize the text, although some effort is required to learn to pronounce it correctly.

The Qur’an and the Bible are very different in composition. The messages of God usually revealed by the angel Gabriel to Muhammad (2, 97) were received during a period of twenty three years and recorded in writing by pious scribes (80, 11-16). Already by the time of the Prophet’s death, much of the Qur’an was written down and a large part of it was also known by heart. Just before the Prophet’s death, he received confirmation that the revelation was complete:

Muhammad needed no successor as a prophet.

After the death of the prophet, these writings were gathered into a single book, according to the order that was established during the last Ramadan before Muhammad’s death. The Qur’an consists of 114 chapters (suras), composed of a varying number of verses (aya). The chapters are not arranged chronologically, but in decreasing order of length -- except that the first sura, known as the Fatiha, has only seven verses. The second surah has 286 verses, whereas the one hundred and fourteenth surah has only five verses. In general, the surahs which Muhammad received in the first part of his career come towards the end of the Qur’an. Within thirteen years of his death, a number of complete copies were made by trusted Companions of the Prophet, working under the orders of Caliph Uthman. Copies were sent out in four directions, with a master copy retained at Madina. The occasional textual variants are explained by the Hadith or tradition that the Qur’an was revealed according to seven readings (ahruf). The variants do not significantly affect the sense of the revelation. In modern editions, some orthographical marks have been added to help those who read the text aloud.

The Bible, by contrast, is a library of books of varying character. In the Hebrew Bible, there are historical books, books of prophecy and wisdom writings. The New Testament includes gospels, letters and a history of the early church as well as the book of Revelation. The Bible tells of events over a time span of some two thousand years. Most Biblical scholars agree that some of the books were written many years after the events to which they refer, although they incorporate earlier sources. Even the gospels were probably not written until some thirty to fifty years after the death of Jesus, although the material which they include circulated in oral form in the early Christian community.

When Muslims say that the Qur’an is the Word of God, they mean this in a more immediate sense than most Christians do when they say the Bible is the Word of God. The Qur’an speaks today. For the faithful reader, it is Remembrance (dhikr), it is Guidance (huda), it is Hearing (shifa), it is Mercy (rahmah), it is Blessed (mubarak), and it is always Most Generous (karim). It is the ultimate means of discrimination between right and wrong.

Christians also believe the Bible speaks today. Often after reading a passage in church, the reader will say "This is the word of the Lord." Yet in contemporary Christian thought Christ is the Word of God in the primary sense. The New Testament points beyond itself to that Word and is only the word of God in a secondary sense. As Kenneth Cragg, an Anglican scholar who has spent a lifetime in the study of Islam, says, "The heart of the Christian revelation is the "event" of Jesus as the Christ, acknowledged as the disclosure in human form of the very nature of God. Hence the New Testament is a derivative from the prior and primary revelation of the living Word "made flesh and dwelling among us."’

Yet until the middle of the nineteenth century the majority of Christians would have regarded the Bible in much the same way as Muslims regard the Qur’an. The nineteenth century saw heated debates, in response to Darwin’s theory of evolution and the beginnings of historical criticism of the Bible, about whether the scripture was verbally inerrant. The general view now would be that the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of Scripture, but did not dictate what they wrote.

With the development of the study of religions in the early twentieth century, many Western scholars applied the historical-critical methods used in the study of the Bible in their approach to the Qur’an. They studied and treated it not as scripture, but as any other book. "Western students of the Qur’an tended to be either Christian or Jewish on the one hand, or secularist, perhaps atheist, on the other", as Wilfred Cantwell Smith, a distinguished scholar in the study of religions, observed. Accordingly, in both cases, they held that the "Muslim view of the matter -- the transcendentalist view, one might call it -- was manifestly silly or perverse, and anyway was wrong; and therefore must be discounted." Western scholars pictured Muhammad writing the Qur’an perhaps under divine inspiration -- as an author might write any other book. Montgomery Watt, for example, suggested that the Qur’an is a collection of the messages that came to Muhammad from his unconscious (in a Jungian sense). But scholarly discussion of how much Muhammad knew about Christianity and Judaism and of other influences upon him is for Muslims wide of the mark. For them, the Qur’an is a message that comes directly from God and was recited by Muhammad. Fazlur Rahman, who is sometimes labeled a Muslim modernist, insists that ‘The Muslim modernists say exactly the same thing as the so-called Muslim fundamentalists say: that Muslims must go back to the original and definitive sources of Islam and perform ijithad (independent judgment) on that basis.’

Yet because Muslims regard the Qur’an as literally the word of God, it is a mistake to regard them as ‘fundamentalists’ in the popular pejorative sense. The term ‘Fundamentalist’ was first used of some conservative Protestants in the USA who at the Niagara Conference of 1895 affirmed that certain beliefs were fundamental to Christianity and therefore non-negotiable. These beliefs, in reaction to evolutionary theories and Biblical criticism, included the verbal inerrancy of scripture, the virgin birth, a substitutionary theory of the atonement and the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Recent studies have suggested that fundamentalism is a conscious reaction to and rejection of modern ways of thinking. It is useful to distinguish fundamentalists from traditionalists, who are those who have not had cause to question traditional beliefs. As Seyyed Hossein Nasr writes, "For traditional man, Muslim or otherwise, that is a man whose life and thought are molded by a set of principles of transcendent origin and who lives in a society in which these principles are manifested in every sphere does not have cause to question the teaching of his religion. Fundamentalists are aware of the questioning and vigorously oppose it.

Fundamentalists reject the view that all knowledge is historically conditioned and hold that certain truths are true in an absolute and timeless sense. They also take a particular myth or symbol as true in the absolute sense. But in popular parlance, the term ‘fundamentalist’ denotes a person who has a closed mind and is often used with the word extremist to describe Muslims who are strongly opposed to Western society and its values. There is a small minority of Muslims to whom this description applies, but to assume that all Muslims because they believe the Qur’an to be literally the Word of God are ‘fundamentalist’ is a serious mistake.

Many Muslims who accept the absolute authority of the Qur’an, also engage in lively debate about its meaning and application in the contemporary world. The distinguished scholar Dr Irfan Ahmad Khan begins the Preface to his Insight Into the Qur’an, with the words, ‘This book is an effort to understand the Qur’an with a modern mind.’ While a text may be unchanging, its interpretation and application are made in a world which is ever changing. Islamic doctrine, law and thinking in general is based on four sources or fundamental principles. They are the Qur’an, the Traditions or Sunna, the Consensus of the Community (ijma) and individual thought (ijtihad).

Sunna is customary practice which primarily refers to the way in which the Prophet and his Companions lived and to what they said and did -- as well as noticing those matters on which they were silent. It has been said that ‘the Sunna forms the first living commentary on what the Qur’an means and thus becomes equally the foundation for Muslim life.’ The concrete example of how the Prophet behaved sets the standard for the Muslim. His human acts and words were repeated as an example to the faithful. Many stories were told about him and a way had to be established of determining their authenticity. The Sunna of the Prophet were handed down in the form of short narratives told by one of the Companions or contemporaries. For example, Uqba ibn Amir said that "someone sent the Prophet a silk gown and he wore it during prayers, but on withdrawing he pulled it off violently with a gesture of disgust and said, ‘This is unfitting for a God-fearing man"’. Such a narrative is called a hadith or statement.

The way of checking authenticity was to establish the source of the tradition. If it was not told by one of the companions, then it was necessary to state the chain of authority going back to the original source of the narrative. By this means, hadith were classified as sound, good or weak. Various collections of hadith were made -- primarily as legal precedents -- and six collections were accepted as especially authoritative. For example, the collection (Sahih) made by al-Bukhari (810-70), who began the study of hadith at the age of 10 and who had a fine memory, contains over 7,000 narratives. al-Bukhari is said to have traveled widely and to have interviewed a thousand sheiks, or religious leaders, and to have examined more than 200,000 hadith, rejecting many of them. His collection is divided into 97 ‘books’ and sub-divided into 3,450 chapters. M. M. Khan’s English translation runs to nine volumes. The collection by Muslim (817-75), who was born in Persia, who also traveled extensively, was made from 300,000 traditions and pays special attention to the chain of authorities. These two collections are amongst Islam’s most holy books.

Ijma means the consensus of the community. It comes from a word meaning to gather or converge The word jami’a, which means the gathering of the faithful and is sometimes used of a mosque, comes from the same root. Only when the community of the faithful agrees is a principle or practice legitimated. Ijma has to be consistent with the Qur’an, the hadith and applied analogy (qiyas). According to Sunni tradition, the community of Muhammad would never agree on error. It is, therefore, the community of the faithful who are the guarantors of a true Islam. Authority rests with the community not with a ‘Pope’ or religious hierarchy. In my view, in Christianity also authority rests with the community of the faithful with whom the Living Christ is present. Too often the ordained seem to have claimed a special authority, whereas I see ordination as primarily commissioning for particular work not conferring a privileged status. Islam has been a more democratic religion than Christianity. The Shi’a tradition, unlike, the Sunni does not accept ijma.. Instead it relies on the light of the imams, whom Shi’ites believe receive special divine guidance and on the authority of ayatollahs -- a modern title for religious leaders who gain a personal following. It is not surprising that the Shi’a community, which accepts charismatic leadership, is also more fragmented.

In the Sunna community it is a matter of debate whether the fourth source of authority, ijtihad, which means independent judgement, based on study and acknowledged expertise, is still open. Rigorists claim that earlier ijtihad completed its task and a final shari’a or code of legal practice is now in force. Others believe that reinterpretation of the law in changing circumstances may be possible. In Shi’a Islam, the mujtahid, who makes and mediates such judgements, has an important role. In Sunni tradition, the emphasis is on the Ulama, or those who are learned in Islamic law and teaching whose task is to express the mind or consensus of the community. Many members of the Ulama are great scholars with a deep knowledge of Islamic scriptures and traditions.

An explanation of the sources of authority helps to explain how the Muslim world reacts to change and in part explains why there is much variety in Muslim practice and teaching. Some groups, as in every religion, of course, claim that their expression of the faith is the only true Islam. Another reason for variety is that there are several interpretations of the Shari’a or religious law, which gives a systematic description of how Muslims should live. There are four classic schools. The Hanafites recognize that the Qur’an and the hadith do not decide every issue so there is place for properly informed opinion and judgement. The Malikites are more cautious about the use of hadith. The Shafi’ites and even more so, the Hanbalites, stress the control of the Qur’an and hadith alone. Thus different schools allow more or less freedom for informed opinion. The Hanafite school, for example, attaches more attention to the principle of the law than its letter. Thus if any law deduced by analogy is seen to be inequitable, harsh or inconvenient, then the Hanafi jurist is at liberty to discard it and to adopt one that is convenient and humane. This is not an arbitrary process but a method of using the principles of Law to fit the circumstances of a given case. Different traditions may, therefore, adopt different attitudes, for example, to the use of contraceptives.

In some parts of the Muslim world the most conservative traditions have become dominant and have created in the West an unfairly rigorist view of Islam. The Wahhabiya movement, which has become dominant in Saudi Arabia, is based on the Hanbalite Sharia, which as we have seen gives hardly any lee-way for human opinion and judgement. Basing their teaching only on the Qur’an and the authentic Sunna, they reject 1,400 years of development in Islamic theology and mysticism. Punishments are rigorous and anything from non-Islamic sources is to be opposed. Hence those schooled in this tradition will be suspicious of Western cultural influence, especially when it is linked to military or economic oppression. There is therefore a profound struggle in the Muslim world for the soul of Islam. This is a subject to which we return.

Muslim and orthodox Jewish attitudes to scripture have made me look again at the assumptions of the historical-criticism of scripture in which I was trained. Essentially, the historical-critical approach tries to identify what a text meant to those for whom it was first written. This means trying to identify editorial work and the various sources which have been brought together to create the Biblical text as we now have it. This is a skilled and disciplined task and applies the methods of textual and historical scholarship to the Bible. It has greatly enriched our knowledge. Yet, as Cantwell Smith pointed out, this approach reflects the individualism of the West. "Central or basic was deemed to be the meaning of the individual person who said or wrote something: his or her intention." Linked to this is what Cantwell Smith calls the historical fallacy that the Qur’an is "fundamentally or exclusively a seventh-century document", linked to the assumption that its author was Muhammad and not God. Scripture like any great piece of writing -- and more so -- has a life of its own. It does not have one fixed meaning but addresses each individual reader. There is a hadith which has God saying, "when someone recites or reads the Qur’an, that person is, as it were, entering into conversation with Me and I into conversation with him or her."

It is a common place to suggest that the Gospels as we now have them reflect the concerns of the Christian community in the second half of the first century, the period in which the Gospels were probably written. Much effort has gone into identifying what Jesus actually said or did. Some scholars say there is little that we can know with certainty, others are more confident. But this raises the question of where does scriptural authority lie. Is it with text as we have received it or with the supposed reconstruction of the scholar? Some Christian scholars are now more interested in the text as we have it and in the history of how it has been used and understood over the centuries by the Church. Although scripture derives its authority from God, in a sense it is the community that regards a text as authoritative that bestows authority upon it. This means that past arguments amongst Christians about the rival authority of Church and Bible lose their importance. The two are inseparable. Similarly, the Muslim affirmation that Muhammad is the Prophet of God implies that the message he delivered is indeed from God.

Some understanding of the place of scripture in other faith communities can help Christians be more aware of their particular view of scripture. There is also great benefit in reading passages of scripture together with Jews and Muslims. They can bring new insights to familiar passages. Most important of all, the Qur’an, "a mercy to the worlds" can be a book of inspiration to all who are believers in God. Arthur Arberry wrote that the task of translating the Qur’an, which he undertook, "not lightly, and carried to its conclusion at a time of great personal distress, . . . comforted (him) in a manner for which he will always be grateful. He therefore acknowledges his gratitude to whatever power or Power inspired the man and the Prophet who first recited these scriptures."

The beauty of the Taj Mahal is overwhelming. I had, of course, seen pictures of it, but when, as a young student, I first went to Agra and saw the Taj, I had a feeling of awe and wonder at the grandeur of God. Made of shining white marble, the Taj was built by Emperor Shah Jehan in memory of his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Rabindranath Tagore described it as "a tear on the face of eternity. When, later, I visited the great Dome of the Rock in the old city of Jerusalem, I felt a similar feeling. The Mosque of Omar, as it is also known, is built on the place where traditionally Abraham had tried to sacrifice his son Isaac/Ishmael and from where the Prophet Muhammad (570-632 CE) set out for his ascent to the seventh heaven). It is magnificent with its carpets and ornamentation and uplifting with its sense of space. Whenever I have returned to these buildings, which I have done many times, something of the first experience has been renewed so I have never doubted that Islam is a genuine revelation of God.

Such experiences as I have had at the Taj Mahal and the Dome of the Rock of the numinous were called by the theologian Rudolf Otto (1869-1937), in his book The Idea of the Holy, mysterium tremendum. The tremendum implies a sense of fear and awe and of awareness of our creatureliness as we are overpowered by Majesty. Mysterium points to the accompanying sense also of Mystery, which is a feeling of fascination and attraction, which can lead into a sense of joy and peace.

It has been said that "A God comprehended is no God". The great mosques of Islam renew in me the sense of the wonder and holiness of God, to whom the prophet Isaiah in his vision heard the seraphs call out, "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord Almighty, the whole earth is full of his glory" (Isa. 6, 3).

This sense of Divine glory is reinforced in Islam by the regular bowing of the head to the ground in prayer. Recently I visited Anandapur Sikhri and the Golden Temple at Amritsar, two of the Sikhs’ most holy shrines, and I was expected repeatedly to bow my head to the ground. I realized how this physical gesture reinforces a sense of humility before the greatness of God.

Christians and Muslims largely agree on their belief about God. In 1076 Pope Gregory VII wrote to Prince al-Nasir, "There is a charity which we owe to each other more than the other peoples because we recognize and confess one sole God, although in different ways." In 1734 George Sale, a translator of the Qur’an, referred in his introduction to the views of an Italian scholar, Ludovico Marracci, who was the confessor to Pope Innocent XI. Sale wrote:

More recently, the Second Vatican Council declared that

Likewise, Pope John Paul II, addressing young Moroccans in Casablanca in 1986, told them, "We believe in the same God, the one God, the living God, the God who creates the world and brings the world to perfection."

Even so, this is by no means obvious to many Christians and it is necessary to lose time to affirm this point. Not long ago, I was asked in a BBC interview, "How can you join with members of other faiths in prayer? Surely, they worship different gods?" My answer was that I am a monotheist and believe there is only one God, who is the Creator of all people. Our pictures of that God may differ, but there is only one Divine reality.

For this reason, as I am writing in English, I prefer to use the word God rather than Allah, to emphasize that there is one Divine Reality of whom we as Christians or Muslims are both speaking, just as I dislike the use of the word "Yahweh" for God in some modern translations of the Bible. I am aware, however, that Muslims have usually preferred to use the word "Allah" rather than God in their translations of the Qur’an into English and I honor this when I quote from the Holy Qur’an. "Allah", of course, is the word that Arab-speaking Christians use for God.

Both the Bible and the Qur’an affirm and declare the reality of God. They do not argue for God’s existence. In both God speaks to human beings or is the object of their praise or the One to whom they pray. Both Christians and Muslims believe that God is One, although some Muslims in their criticisms of the doctrine of the Trinity have appeared to think that Christians believe in more than one God.

For both Muslims and Christians, God is the Creator of the world. Unlike the Bible, the Qur’an has only brief references to the creation of the world -- the longest being Surah 41, 9-12:

Perhaps because it is less interested than the Bible in how the world was created, the Qur’an speaks more about God’s continuing work of creation. In a comment on Surah 7, 54, the Saudi Arabian translation of the Qur’an says, ‘lest we should be obsessed with the Jewish idea that Allah rested on the seventh day, we are told that the Creation was but a prelude to Allah’s work: for his authority is exercised constantly by the laws which He establishes and enforces in all parts of His creation.’ The Arabic word for creation, khalaqa, is used in the Qur’an of contemporary happenings. When the four stages of the embryo in the womb are described, it is said that God ‘created’ or ‘made’ each out of the previous one (23, 12-14):

God is also Lord of history. Both the Bible and the Qur’an are "sacral history", that is to say they describe past events as evidence of God’s controlling activity. The Qur’an is less interested in chronology than the Old Testament, so that its references to past events are in no particular order and are used as examples for the present. God exercises his control by sending ‘natural’ disasters as a punishment. For example, the Flood destroyed everyone because of wickedness, except Noah and his family. Again, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah was a result of the evil behavior of their inhabitants. God also initiates a series of events by ‘calling’ individuals, such as Abraham or Moses, to undertake a special task. God may also strengthen men to fight in battle and to gain victory.

Muslims tend to be more conscious of God’s controlling influence on the course of events. The phrase ‘insh’Allah – "if God wills it" is common, just as some Christians often used to say "Deus vult" (d.v.) Yet this does not mean that human behaviour is pre-determined, although at one time there were heated debates on the subject. The orthodox view is that all possibilities are created by God, but that human beings have the responsibility to "acquire" actions out of the possibilities, thereby becoming accountable. Disobedience to God’s will is, therefore, a human choice for which human beings are held responsible. The believer, however, is conscious that he or she only does the will of God through God’s grace.

The Qur’an begins "In the Name of Allah, Most gracious (rahman), Most merciful (rahim)." This description is often repeated and God’s mercy is emphasized. There are said to be ninety-nine beautiful names of God. Many of them are to be found in the Qur’an. The names are recited on the Muslim rosary and according to a hadith or saying of the Prophet, anyone who repeats the names of God will be sure of Paradise.

Yet although Muslims speak so much of the Mercy and Compassion of God, Montgomery Watt, a Christian scholar with a deep knowledge of and sympathy for Islam, probably correctly assesses the views of many Christians when he says that they "would claim that God as conceived by Christians is more loving than God as conceived by Muslims." I am not sure, however, that the Christian claim is true. During the Middle Ages, Christendom was dominated by pictures and carvings of the Last Judgement. Montgomery Watt suggests that for Christians God is not only benevolent towards those who obey and love him, but God is like a shepherd who goes out to look for and rescue sheep that have gone astray. Perhaps the Christian emphasis on God rescuing the sinner relates to the belief in original sin. Muslims reject this doctrine and believe that the individual is able to obey God’s commands. Moreover, as Montgomery Watt notes, in the Qur’an, God loves all humanity and has sent to each community a prophet-messenger calling on them to serve God -- so all people are given an opportunity of attaining "the great success", which is life in Paradise.

Traditionally Christians have spoken as if heaven was reserved for Christians and that others would go to hell. There are passages in the Qur’an which suggest that those who fall away will not be given another chance, but then the Epistle to the Hebrews warns that "It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the word of God and the powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace" (Hebrews 6, 4-6). In Islam, the possibility of intercession on the Last Day was developed and with it the belief that Muhammad would intercede for the sinners of his community.

Montgomery Watt also suggests that "beliefs about God’s love are probably reflected in the treatment of sinners and criminals." Farid Esack, a radical Muslim scholar from South Africa, however, comments that ‘much of the talk of a "God of love" has become little more than Western conservative Christianity avoiding fundamental issues of structural social injustice and poverty in a society that prevents the love of Allah from being experienced in concrete terms in the daily lives of ordinary people. In condoning social suffering, [Christians], he adds, "certainly have a lot of fellow travelers among some Muslim groups." He could have added also that some radical Christians, such as those who supported the World Council of Churches’ Anti-Racism program have been vocal in campaigning against structural oppression and racism. Akbar Ahmed rightly points out that in the global civilization, true Christian, "those who follow Christ both in word and deed are few and far between" and that it is a mistake to identify Christianity with dominant Western attitudes and behavior.

Farid Esack suggests we need to walk a path between "the apolitical fuzzy love of God and the relentless coldness of a distant Transcendent Being who only cares via retribution." Perhaps this is one example of where Christians and Muslims need each other to find a proper balance and both to come closer to God’s will.

Further, even if for Christians the love of God is at the heart of the gospel, the Bible warns of the judgement of God that those who turn away from the light bring on themselves. God’s love knows no limits, but the Bible is also clear about the serious consequences of our moral failures.

In a sense the sort of comparison made by Montgomery Watt is unhelpful. There are so many variations in the attitudes and behavior amongst people in different parts of the world and in different centuries who belong to the same religion, that it is almost impossible to compare like to like. This is why the key question is "what is true religion?" What teachings and practices best promote that fullness of life that is God’s will for human beings? Christians and Muslims are both called to be vigilant in ensuring that their communities live up to the highest ideals of their faith and maybe they can spur each other to good deeds. I have found that conversations with Muslim friends nearly always serve as a balancing corrective to my own views.

The way in which members of each faith can help members of the other find a truer balance takes us back to the starting point of this chapter. I began with the sense of the holiness and majesty of God that I feel in some of the great mosques. The Bible too affirms God’s holiness and at the communion service, Christians are invited to echo the great hymn of praise:

Yet perhaps some Christian worship today with its emphasis on fellowship and popular music has lost a sense of awe and holiness.

Christians believe that the glory of God is to be seen in the face of Jesus Christ. He awakes similar feelings of awe and fascination. Yet I wonder whether Christian worship at times in emphasizing the love of God and Jesus’ closeness to his followers may lose something of the sense of divine holiness. Islam also speaks of God who is close to the believer -- as close as the jugular vein. It is a question of balance. There are different emphases within religions, but perhaps Islam and Christianity can serve as correctives to each other. Both speak of a God who is transcendent. Isaiah speaks of God as "the high and lofty One . . . who lives for ever, whose name is holy" (57, 15) and Surah 7. 54 says that God "settled Himself on the Throne." Yet the same verse of Isaiah has God say, "I live in a high and holy place, but also with him who is contrite and lowly in spirit to revive the spirit of the lowly and to revive the heart of the contrite." Likewise the Qur’an God says

Thus although I have spoken of my sense of the glory of God in Islam, there is also, especially in the Sufi mystical tradition, a profound sense of God’s intimacy and passionate love. The mystical tradition, with which I have great sympathy and about which I have written in the companion volume What can we Learn from Hinduism, unites believers beyond the differences of doctrines and ritual and stresses the longing to experience the presence of God. Sufism, like all mysticism, is essentially a journey towards Unity with God -- a journey which involves death to the self. This teaching is summed up in the apparently simple poem:

Sufism has given particular attention to the various stages of the spiritual journey. One of the earliest and best accounts is the Forty Stations of the eleventh century Sufi master Abu Sa’id ibn Abi’l-Khayr, of which a translation is reproduced in Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s Living Sufism. The thirty-ninth station is the supreme goal, to see God with the eye of the heart. The fortieth station purifies the Sufi from all desire.

There is a moving story of some Sufis who approached some Christian monks in Algeria -- monks who later to be massacred -- saying that they wanted to meet in prayer and silence. Mystics of all faiths point us to the true place of meeting which is in the presence of God, where comparisons become if not odious at least irrelevant, as the mystics sense the Divine Mystery, who is both the source and sustainer of all life and the most intimate presence in the heart and life of the believer. Deep dialogue can itself serve as a threshold to an experience of the numinous.

Where there is a real attempt to listen to the other, even the doctrine of the Trinity may not be so divisive as it appears. The Qur’an insists on the Oneness of God. It classes amongst unbelievers those who say ‘Allah is one of three’ (5, 73), but that has never been orthodox Christian belief. It may be that some heretical Christians at the time of Muhammed were teaching this. The doctrine of the Trinity speaks of ‘one substance and three persons’, but the modern English use of the word ‘person’ is likely to distort the meaning of this formula. The original Greek word, hypostasis, was translated into Latin as persona, which meant an ‘actor’s mask’ or a role in a play. It did not have the meaning of the modern English word person which suggests an independent self-conscious being. If the word person is taken in that sense, the doctrine of the Trinity can come appear to be tritheism or belief in three gods..

In my understanding the Trinity is a symbol which affirms the Christian experience that God is known as our Creator and Sustainer, that God is also known in the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus and that in both the fellowship of believers and in personal devotion God is present as the Holy Spirit. Further the symbol speaks of Love -- expressed in the mutual relationship of Father and Son bound together by the Spirit -- as the Ultimate dynamic reality. Yet, I hesitate to say that the doctrine of the Trinity describes God’s inner being and life. It is at best a symbol of a Mystery that we cannot fully fathom.

A little while after writing this, I came across a poem by an eighteenth century Persian poet called Hatif Isfahani, which praises Christianity for its affirmation of Divine Unity. I am glad to have the support of a ‘Christian charmer of hearts’:

Although Muslims say that God is one, some Muslim thinkers said that God had a multiplicity of attributes. These were chiefly, omnipotence, omniscience, will, speech, hearing, seeing and life. The Ash’arites -- followers of al-Ashari (873-935) a foremost Muslim theologian -- held that the attributes ‘were not God and not other than God.’ Some Mediaeval Christian theologians who lived in the Muslim world and who wrote in Arabic compared the Christian hypostases with Islamic attributes. One writer said that the hypostases represented goodness, wisdom and power; another that they were existence, speech and life.

The intellectual problem is that if there is only One God, if this is over-emphasized, any separate identity of the created world is dissolved. Such teaching, known as Monism, denies the reality of matter and maintains that despite appearances the natural world and human beings are part of God and have no independent being. These almost insoluble questions are those with which the Church fathers and mediaeval Muslim theologians wrestled. Some modern Christian thinkers, such as John Hick or Raimundo Panikkar, in their interpretation of the Trinity as a metaphor come close to Muslim thinking, but as the distinguished Muslim scholar Professor S. A. Ali observes, Muslims will always be uneasy with the language of ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit.’

This may all seem a little remote, although Seyyed Hossein Nasr of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at George Town University in Washington says, the basic element in dialogue is "faith in God." The discussion, I hope, illustrates my major point that when you ask the meaning of a doctrine or, in other words, what was the insight or truth of experience that those who formulated these doctrines wanted to safeguard, you find yourself grappling with them with concepts almost too difficult for words. You find also that others using quite different terminology may be grappling with similar issues. As some Muslim and Christian thinkers come close enough to each other to understand the truths of experience which are enshrined in long-held doctrines, they find themselves grappling with same mysteries. They have moved beyond religious frontiers to the frontier -- which no thinker, however, brilliant can ever cross -- to the meeting place of the human with the Divine where we find ourselves like Job speaking of things we do not understand, of things too wonderful for us to know and where, in God’s mercy, we may experience the reality of the One God whose glory passes our understanding.

"The question today is what is true religion, not what is the true religion". These words of Bishop George Appleton some twenty years ago are particularly relevant as we approach Islam today and may also encourage us to reflect on the authentic Christian message. A recent Tablet editorial also speaks about "rescuing true religion".

Islam and Christianity are two great monotheistic religions. They do not always agree, but I think we should see their disagreements as in a sense complimentary. Perhaps the image of balancing scales may be helpful. An over-emphasis on God’s mercy may neglect demands for justice but to stress justice may limit compassion. Only the Almighty holds a true balance. In our respective faiths we seek a similar balance as we try to do God’s will. There is great variety within both Islam and Christianity and we shall find different traditions in each religion have their own emphasis.

Let me give another example, I have engaged in conversations with Jews, Christians and Muslims about repentance and forgiveness. Does repentance have to come first? There are passages in the New Testament, such as the parables of the Lost Sheep and the Prodigal Son which suggest that, like the Shepherd or the Father, the injured person may need to take the initiative in seeking reconciliation. But others will say "How can we forgive someone who is not sorry?" They may also say that to show kindness to the cruel is to betray their victims. I have myself felt that the early release of some prisoners in Northern Ireland who had been found guilty of "terrorist" offences must have been very painful for the relatives of those who had been killed.

These are issues to which we shall return. My point here is that our reflection on them is deepened as Christians and Muslims -- with when possible people of other faiths -- when we can discuss these great issues together.

To give one more example. I was trained in historical-critical studies of the Bible. This suggests, for example, that we only know of the life and sayings of Jesus as they have been handed down to us by the early church and recorded by the Evangelists, each of whom had his own special interests. Can we then be sure of any saying of Jesus that it was actually spoken by him? Has the authority of scripture in effect been replaced by the authority of scholar’s, often very different, reconstructions of the text. There is now, in fact, a renewed emphasis by some Christian scholars on the received text. Muslims hold that the Qur’an is the very word of God, but they have traditions of interpretation. My point is that although Christian and Muslim views of scripture may, at first sight, seem very different, the issues are more complex and together we can come to deeper understanding of the place of scripture in a faith community.

This book is not an "Introduction to Islam" in the usual sense, although I hope it will be self-explanatory to those Christians who know little about Islam. Rather it is a reflection on my reading about Islam and meeting with many Muslims over some forty years. When I first went to India, I was told that the exterior dialogue had to be matched by an interior dialogue. Exterior dialogue is the conversation with people of another faith or the reading about it and the attempt to understand what, say, Muslims believe and practice. Inner dialogue is the subsequent reflection, in the light of my Christian discipleship, on what I agree with, where I have questions and disagreements, and on what I can learn. Certainly Islam has helped to deepen and purify my faith in God. I hope this approach will help Christians understand and enter into conversation with Muslims. It is I think more exciting and spiritually enriching to talk about our beliefs and devotions rather than just to accumulate "external" information about a religion, although our conversation with Muslims may require us first to unlearn inherited prejudices. Indeed, it is as I have engaged in discussion with Muslims that the Qur’an has become an alive and exciting book, whereas on first opening it, without any background, it can seem like much of the Bible, difficult to comprehend.

Indeed preparatory reading for this book has made me more aware how prevalent both ignorance of Islam and prejudice against Muslims is in the West. As the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, said when he addressed Muslim scholars at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, "It is extraordinary how ignorant we are of one another. Yet ignorance is the most terrible of cultural diseases for from it stem fear, misunderstanding and intolerance." Indeed some years ago the French Catholic priest and scholar of Islam, Louis Massignon (1883-1962) said that Christians had to accomplish what amounted to a Copernican re-centring in order to understand Islam. It is a task on which we have scarcely begun.

Yet important as it is to gain correct knowledge of each other’s religion, it is I think more exciting and spiritually enriching to talk about our beliefs and devotions rather than just to accumulate "external" information about a religion. Indeed, it is as I have engaged in discussion with Muslims that the Qur’an has become an alive and absorbing book, whereas on first opening it, without any background, it may seem, like much of the Bible, difficult to comprehend.

The book was planned before September 11th, but I did not start writing it until the beginning of 2002, so that is not unaffected by the momentous events of recent months. I try to address some of the issues in the chapter on "Islam in the Modern World", but the deeper dialogue with Islam, which has a long history, also needs to be maintained and deepened. I hope this book will introduce a wider audience to this conversation which has such exciting and mutually enriching potential.

I am grateful to John Hunt for the invitation to write this book and for his help and encouragement. This has given me the chance to reflect on my nearly forty years of reading about Islam and on meetings and conversations with Muslims in many parts of the world, to whom I express my thanks and appreciation. I am especially grateful to members of the Oxford Abrahamic Group, The Three Faiths Forum and the Manor House Jewish, Christian and Muslim Dialogue Group as well as to members of other interfaith organisations to which I belong.

I am grateful to Roger Boase for reading and commenting on the script (and to Dr Ali for writing a Foreword). Mistakes and opinions expressed are of course my responsibility. As always I am very grateful to Mary for her support.

Recent events have made me aware how little even yet members of different religions understand each other and how much ignorance and prejudice there is to dispel. More than ever Christians and Muslims need both to affirm the beliefs and values that they share and to act together for a more just and peaceful world. May we as servants of the one God compete in good works.

22 March 2002 Marcus Braybrooke

The Rev. Marcus Braybrooke is a man of such deep religious faith that he makes us see the divine in every faith and creed. He has devoted a great deal of his energy in the service of the inter-faith movement.

Every inter-faith organization in Britain has his name in a place of honour as a member, founder or chairman. His work in building bridges between the communities of different cultural traditions has been exemplary. But it is in his writing that he manifests his warmth and true understanding of the "Other". In the present political climate in Europe and the USA, the writings of the Rev. Marcus Braybrooke are acts of courage inspired by his unbounded humanity and fellow feelings for all humankind. This volume is a scholar’s presentation of Islam to the West by a westerner. He outlines those areas of agreements as well as those in which our faiths differ. He took great care in consulting references in order to dispel some of the misinterpretations of Islam. His sympathetic approach should alert the western reader to look afresh into a greatly maligned faith. He writes about Islam with the humility of the seeker of the truth.

Does not the title of the book and its beautifully written contents clearly underline this outstanding quality of the book and its author?

I hope that his example will inspire a Muslim to write on what we Muslims can learn from Christians.

27th June 2002.