Jesus and Mohammad

Abstract

Within the Qur’an there are passages containing universal religious teaching concerning God, human self-giving to God, and the divine judgement, and also passages containing Mohammad’s human and culture-bound application of his understanding of God to the political and moral problems of his own time and his own society. Some have even attempted a distinction along these lines between the Meccan suras, with their revelation of the divine unity, and the Medinan suras, grappling with the problems of a new religio-political community. But such a scheme is impossibly over-simplified. The texts do not divide historically in their neat way. For example, the marvellous Light passage occurs in the same sura that prescribes the eighty and one hundred lash punishments for slander and for fornication. But more fundamentally, we are brought here face to face with the ambiguous relationship between a new and fuller human awareness of God, with the new quality of life that it makes possible, and the ordering of the affairs of large societies of people, the great majority of whom have scarcely begun to undergo this spiritual and moral transformation. It might at this point seem gratuitous and indeed potentially offensive to compare Mohammad and Jesus, Islam and Christianity. But in fact I believe that such a comparison will illuminate precisely the complementarities and contradictions between the religious insight of the saints and the exigencies of a viable community of non-saints in a non-saintly world.