Quote Originally Posted by jmm99 View Post
If I, as a "shirker" (say, a traditional Roman Catholic), tell a Muslim that we worship the same God, am I not blaspheming his God ?

That's the major quibble I found in Chapter 2.
You’ll be fine if you’re a Nestorian or a Julianist.

The point you’ve made is not just a quibble but a major criticism and one I find recurring in many such texts (usually those with a polemically multi-cultural axe to grind).

The Christianity with which Mohammed was familiar, as were his contemporaries and many of his successors was that of the Arian, Monophysite and more importantly the Nestorian varieties with an admixture of Ethiopian Copt. Arabia and the Levant contained the major and significant (at the time) communities following heterodox variations of the Christian theme/tradition (“Christianity” if there is such a thing, unlike Islam, has a much more complex origin, who, for instance knows anything about the early Jewish Christian movements!). When Muslims speak of Christianity as having become perverted they do so on the basis of the understanding of Christianity that Muhammad himself held. In the Islamic worldview Trinitarian conceptions of Christ elevate him to the status of equality with God and thus approach polytheism(shirk) but only because their own understanding is based on sources inimical to that concept already. After the Islamic conquests many “Christian” communities actually found it easier to live under Islam because Muslims did not persecute them for refusing to tow the Constantinian line of Trinitarianism (but also because in holding such views they did not undermine the foundations of Islamic power given the Trinitarian outlook was associated with Islam’s major rival Byzantium). The role of these early heterodox communities in providing Islam with many of its conceptions of who and what Christ is/should be is interesting in terms of the history of ideas. Of course, Muhammad and Muslims only chose those aspects of these traditions that did not undermine Muhammad’s self concept or his vision for his followers.

The following provides a compressed introduction to this fascinating subject….

Irfan Shahid, “Islam and Oriens Christianus: Makka, 610-622 AD” in Grypeou, “The Encounter of Eastern Christianity with Early Islam”

“After the fall of the Ethiopian house of Abraha around 570 ad and the occupation of south Arabia by the Persians, the Ethiopians were scattered as communities in western Arabia, and it was in Makka that a strong Ethiopian colony was to be found in the forty years or so that followed the Persian occupation. They fought for the Makkans and protected them from external threats, guarded their caravans, and performed certain menial duties for them. More relevant for the theme of this chapter is to emphasize their assimilation into Arab and Makkan society. Ibn Habib has a chapter on Makkans who married Ethiopian women, and so some Makkans were sons of Ethiopian parents. Even more striking is the Ethiopian participation in the highest forms of Arabic culture in pre-Islamic times—poetry. The Ethiopian community in Arabia produced some poets, including the celebrated ‘Antar, whose Qasida was counted among the famous Mu‘allaqat, suspended odes. With important trade relations between Makka and Ethiopia across the Red Sea, and a strong Ethiopian colony in Makka itself performing various functions for the Makkans and contracting marriages with some of them, it is natural to suppose that the Makkans should have acquired some knowledge of Ethiopic, and that some Ethiopic words entered into the Arabic of the Makkans. It is also natural to suppose that this colony of Ethiopians must have had an Ethiopic Bible and a place where they could conduct their religious services, if not a church at least an oratory, and they must have had a cleric to celebrate their weddings and officiate at their funerals.[...]” p. 13-14
[...]
“great Christian Arab centre to the south of Makka, Najran in south Arabia, the city that was the scene of well-known martyrdoms which led to its rise as the great centre of pilgrimage in the peninsula. Most relevant for our question its emergence as the location of so many non-orthodox Christian denominations which gave the peninsula the reputation of being Arabia haeresium ferax, ‘Arabia the breeding ground of heresies”. P.18
[...]
“The following are the various Christian denominations which flourished in Najran and south Arabia, a region close to Makka and, what is more, Arabic speaking. They shed a bright light on Quranic Christology:

1. In the fourth century, the Emperor Constantius (who was an Arian like his father Constantine towards the end of his life, and like his successors down to Theodosius the Great) sent his emissary Theophilus Indus to convert south Arabia to Christianity. There the latter succeeded in founding three churches. The Arians, as is well known, emphasized the humanity of Christ and rejected his divinity. Although condemned by the Council of Nicea, Arianism lingered long mostly in the Roman occident, and it is just possible that it lingered also in the orient, in south Arabia, until the sixth or seventh century, as it did until that time among some of the Germanic tribes of western Europe.

2. More important are the Monophysites who dominated the entire Red Sea area, including south Arabia and Najran in particular. The moderate form of Monophysitism, that of Severus of Antioch, prevailed, but this could not have been the provenance of the Quranic rejection of Christ’s divinity, since it accepted the epithet Theotokos applied to the Virgin Mary, which also emphasized his divinity. What is relevant in bringing Monophysitism into this
discussion is to give attention to the appearance of a group within this larger Severan mainstream Monophysitism, namely the Julianists, followers of Julian of Halicarnassus, called the Aphthartodocetae, also related to Docetism, which in one of its forms held that before the crucifixion, Judas Iscariot or Simon of Cyrene was substituted for Jesus who thus miraculously escaped death. Docetism is derived from the Greek verb dokein, ‘to seem’, and the Quranic phrase on the denial of the crucifixion and the substitution of someone else for him, in the phrase wa-lakin shubbiha lahum, is practically a calque of the Greek docetic phrase of the substitution; the root of the Arabic shubbiha is identical with the Greek dokein, and this clearly points to a translation of this docetic view into Arabic in the sixth century, known in Najran where the Julianists lived. They and other related groups had flocked to Najran after being ejected from Orthodox Byzantium and it is there that they spread their teachings.

3. Then there were the Nestorians. The church in Najran owed its origin to Hira on the lower Euphrates, when one of their merchants, Hayyan by name, accepted Christianity there and brought it to Najran. Hira was not then Nestorian, but it became later the centre of Arab Nestorianism in the Land of the two rivers and it kept close relations with Najran and south Arabia. When the Nestorians were firmly established in Nisibis and became the great missionaries of Christianity in Asia, Najran was one of their targets (and so was south Arabia) and their presence in that region is established without doubt. To them may be ascribed the most striking phrase that described Jesus in the Quran, namely ‘Isa Ibn Maryam, ‘Jesus son of Mary’, a phrase which implies more than it expresses, that ‘Isa was not so much the son of Mary as that he was not the son of God”. p.19-20
I think when simple-minded apologists or their well meaning religious counter-parts want to try and initiate a dialogue with Muslims they really need to be aware of the subtle, but important differences and the origins of those differences. It’s not enough to say that we all believe in G-d (well, I don’t but that’s beside the point) and that therefore we should all get on with one another. That is not really the definition of a well formed formula. It is the equivalent of saying that we all believe in peace so why can’t we be peaceful? Well, as the late great Hans J. Morgenthau said, we all believe in peace, but what that peace is exactly, and what it means in reality, is why we have wars (or words to that effect). Yes Muslims want peace, but a peace on their terms. Just like we do. “Peace” or whatever word one is trying to find a homologous signifier for becomes meaningless shorn of it’s symbolic meaning within a chain of cultural signification (that didn’t sound so pompous in my head).


Morgenthau’s fifth principle of political realism;
Political realism refuses to identify the moral aspirations of a particular nation with the moral laws that govern the universe. As it distinguishes between truth and opinion, so it distinguishes between truth and idolatry. All nations are tempted-and few have been able to resist the temptation for long-to clothe their own particular aspirations and actions in the moral purposes of the universe. To know that nations are subject to the moral law is one thing, while to pretend to know with certainty what is good and evil in the relations among nations is quite another. [...] The lighthearted equation between a particular nationalism and the counsels of Providence is morally indefensible, for it is that very sin of pride against which the Greek tragedians and the Biblical prophets have warned rulers and ruled. That equation is also politically pernicious, for it is liable to engender the distortion in judgment which, in the blindness of crusading frenzy, destroys nations and civilizations-in the name of moral principle, ideal, or God himself.