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Previous posts; here, here, here, here and here.

Another snippet from Diarmaid MacCulloch’s book: A History of Christianity – The First Three Thousand Years.

Pages 255 -258

In the late sixth century, at the time of the birth of Muhammad in the city of Mecca (Makkah in Arabic), three varieties of religious belief confronted each other in the Arabian Peninsular. Over the previous century, Judaism and Christianity (itself bitterly divided) had been locked in murderous clashes. Both despised the traditional cults of the region, which amid their considerable variety boasted one of the Middle East’s ancient centres of pilgrimage at Mecca, around a sacred black stone contained in the shrine known as the Ka`aba. For centuries the shrine at Mecca had been of merely local importance, far outshone by the Temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, whose cult Christians had in good measure renewed by their pilgrimage in honour of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, while leaving the actual site of the Jerusalem Temple dishonoured and waste. Then in the fifth century one prominent family of Mecca had vigorously promoted their local shrine and set it on the road to fame and prosperity. A proud descendant of that family, born around 570, was the merchant Muhammad.

[.....]

Muhammad’s revelations of words from God only began for him in middle age, in 610, while he was on one of his regular expeditions to a cave outside Mecca, to retreat from his daily cares into meditation. As revelations continued, he would dictate the words he had heard to an every growing body of disciples, through the years of struggle in which he and his followers (Muslims) saw their fortunes transformed. At first they were a beleaguered group suffering oppression and expulsion – their moment of withdrawal (‘Hijra’) from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 CE has become the basis of Islamic dating. Within Muhammad’s lifetime – he is generally said to have died in 632 CE – Muslims in Mecca had become a victorious and self-confident community which now needed regulation for its life. Both these experiences are reflected in pronouncements which, during the next century and a half, came to be a fixed and written text – still known despite its written form as ‘that which is to be recited’, or Qur’an. In contrast to the similar transition in fortunes for the followers of Christ witnessed in the Gospels, Acts and Epistles of the New Testament, the Muslims from the earliest days won their survival at least partly by physical force of arms, another phase in the struggles which had convulsed the peninsula over the past century, and their subsequent extraordinary expansion was inseparable from military conquest. Little more than half a century after the first convulsions in Mecca, the Dyophysite Patriarch Henanisho I had the courage to point this out to ‘Abd al-Malik, then Islamic caliph (that is, the leader who claimed to be successor to Muhammad). The Caliph asked him to give his opinion of Islam. The Patriarch replied, ‘It is a power that was established by the sword and not a faith confirmed by divine miracles, like Christianity and like the old law of Moses.’

This is not the whole story – in fact forced conversions were not at all the rule in early Islam, even while it was extending its reach by military campaign. At the centre of Muhammad’s achievement was the extraordinary poetry which enshrined his revelations. Muslim sources have often ascribed the Qur’an’s power to its exceptional beauty in the Arabic language, and the Qur’an does not translate well, particularly into English. Conversion to Islam can therefore be a deeply felt aesthetic experience that rarely occurs in Christian accounts of conversion, which are generally the source rather than the result of a Christian experience of beauty. It is perhaps for that reason that from the beginning Islam has set its face against any further representation of the divine in pictures, since the divine beauty is already represented in the words of the Qur’an. It is often said that the Qur’an plays the role in Islam which the incarnate Son has traditionally done in Christianity: a final revelation of God.

{My Note: This is an important point to grasp, to wit, direct comparison of Muhammad with Jesus is moot and inappropriate. If direct comparisons have to be made, then a more fitting one would be that of Jesus with the Qu’ran, as both are viewed as the eternal word of God, perfect and pre-existing.}

[....]

The Qur’an is strikingly preoccupied with the two monotheisms which Mohammad had known from his boyhood, Judaism and Christianity. He was concerned to proclaim a new unity of religion through ‘the God’ (al-ilah, subsequently abbreviated as Allah) who had been the focus of the shrine cult at Mecca, but otherwise Muhammad spoke contemptuously of Arabian traditional cults, and he was very aware of the sacred books which had previously spoken of one God, the Tanakh and the Christian New Testament. His concern for them, and indeed stringent criticism of their content and their over-credulous readers, is particularly evident in the early suras (sections) of the Qu’ran. In its present arrangement, after an initial proclamation of God, who is given the titles of mercy and compassion traditional in Arabian religion, the Qur’an passes to a long sura which takes the name of “The Cow” from its references to stories of Moses and the Children of Israel in their exodus from Egypt. The name of Mary, the mother of Jesus, occurs almost twice as often in the Qur’an as in the New Testament, and she gives her name to one of its suras. By contrast, there is one silence in the Qur’an which is startling once it is noticed: the name of Paul of Tarsus.  Such naming and silence may have been the emphases of the Jewish ‘Ebonite’ Christians long before; and that provokes interesting reflection.

Far from speaking a new message, Muhammad proclaimed Islam as the original truth which later centuries had obscured. Christian apologists of the second century had made the same claim for their message in relation to Judaism. His theme of oneness is a clear contrast with the Christian quarrels about the nature of Christ which Chalcedon failed to heal. in a much-discussed and and not conclusively understood verse of the Qur’an, God is represented as telling the Christians ‘believe in God and his messengers and do not speak of a “Trinity”….God is only one God, he is far above having a son.

{My note: And this is the crux of the problem and conflict, namely, overt denial of the Sonship, and Trinity. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem for instance, bears……

Wikki

……..According to Goitein, inscriptions decorating the interior clearly displaying a spirit of polemic against Christianity, whilst stressing at the same time the Qur’anic doctrine that Jesus was a true prophet. The formula la sharika lahu ‘God has no companion’ is repeated five times, the verses from Sura Maryam 19:35-37, which strongly reaffirm Jesus’ prophethood to God, are quoted together with the prayer: Allahumma salli ala rasulika wa’abdika ‘Isa bin Maryam – “In the name of the One God (Allah) Pray for your Prophet and Servant Jesus son of Mary”. He believes that this shows that rivalry with Christendom, together with the spirit of Islamic mission to the Christians, was at work at the time of construction.^[5]

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