In the year 630 A.D, the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) achieved
one of his most cherished goals: the occupation of Mecca and the
subsequent cleansing of the city from idol worship: it was at once a
political and a religious victory of immense symbolic importance.
Mecca had been declared the centre of the new faith; its conquest was
therefore the fulfillment of a divine promise.
Entering the Ka'ba, the square structure which housed the city's
idols, Muhammad (pbuh) ordered all its icons cleansed or destroyed.
One of the icons in what must have been a very mixed gallery of
divinitieswas a Virgin and child. Approaching the Christian icon,
Muhammad (pbuh) covered it with his cloak and ordered all the
otherswashed away except that one.
Fact or fiction? The question is immaterial. The report I cited is at
least 1200 years old and therefore belongs to some of the earliest
strataof Muslim historical writing.
What this episode illustrates is the fact that between Islam and the
figure of Jesus Christ there exists a literary tradition spanning a
millennium and a half of acontinuous historical relationship -- a
preoccupation with Jesus that may well be unique among the world's
great non-Christian religions. Todo full justice to this record, I
would need a far larger canvas than the one available to me today.
Instead I can only hope to draw a sketch of the contours of that
relationship; to point to only a few of its highest peaks, its
defining moments.
The Qur'an is the axial text of Islamic civilization,and it is of
course where we must begin for Islam's earliest images of Jesus.
Approximately one third of the Quranic text is made up of narratives
of earlier prophets, most of them Biblical. Among these prophetic
figures, Jesus stands out as the most puzzling. The Qur'anrewrites the
story of Jesusmore radically than that of any other prophet, and in
doing so it reinvents him. The intention is clearly to distance him
from the opinions about him current among Christians. The result is
surprising to a Christian reader or listener. The Jesus of the Qur'an,
more than any equivalent prophetic figure, is placed inside a
theological argument rather than inside a narrative. He is very unlike
his Gospel image. There is no Incarnation, no Ministry and no Passion
. His divinity is strenuously denied either by him or by God directly.
Equally denied is his crucifixion. A Christian may well ask, what can
possibly be left of his significance if all these essential attributes
of his image are gone?
Jesus reinterpreted by theQur'an is singled out, again and again, as a
prophet of very special significance. Uniquely among prophets he is
described as a miracle of God, an aya ; he is the word and spirit of
God; heis the prophet of peace par excellence; and , finally it is he
who predicts the coming of Muhammad (pbuh) and thus, one might say, is
theharbinger of Islam.
How did these earliest images of Jesus grow and develop inside Islamic
culture? The Hadith or Prophetic Tradition of Muhammad (pbuh) depicts
him as a figure who will come at the end of days to help bring the
world to its end. He can now be said to bracket the era of Islam,
standing right at its beginning and right at its end. But it is the
rapidly growing literary tradition of Islam which now began to embrace
the various images of Jesus current in the lands that Islam had
conquered. There came together a corpus of sayings and stories
attributed to Jesus which in their totality one could call the Muslim
Gospel (a collection of these I have just published under the title
The Muslim Jesus ). Let me quote a few of these sayings and
stories:"Jesus said, Blessed is he who sees with his heart but whose
heart is not in what he sees". Here's another: "Jesus said, The world
is a bridge; cross this bridge but do not build upon it". And here's a
short exchange: "Jesus met a man and asked him, What are you doing?'I
am devoting myself to God,' the man replied. Jesus asked, 'Who is
caring for you?' 'My brother,' said the man. Jesus said, 'Your brother
ismore devoted to God than you are'." And so it goes on, some three
hundred such sayings andstories, which Muslim culture was to ascribe
to Jesus across a millennium of continuous fascination with his images
and manifestations. At times he is a fierce ascetic, at other times he
is the gentle teacher of manners, at yet others thepatron of Muslim
mystics, the prophet of the secrets of creation, the healer of the
wounds of nature andof man.
But back now to my sketch, to just a few otherilluminations inside
this lengthy historical record. In the tenth century A.D. we have the
great Baghdad mystic al-Hallaj, whose life and crucifixion was called
"The Passion ofal-Hallaj" by the celebrated French Orientalist
Massignon.
:->
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|- - - - wassalam;
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And Allah knows the best!
~
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