Bible Stories

Islam, like Buddhism and Christianity, has an identifiable historical founder, about whom we know a great deal. Muhammad was born about the year AD 570 in the flourishing commercial city of Mecca. At the age of forty he began his prophetic ministry. In AD 622 he moved to Medina (Yathrib), where he died in AD 632.

The records show him as a man of infinite patience, who preached in Mecca for thirteen years and hardly made a convert. In his later years he showed himself a great leader of men. He gave to the warring Arab tribes unity, a simple creed (the Muslim creed consists only of the two clauses ‘I proclaim that there is no God but God, and Muhammad is the apostle of God‘), and a sense of destiny. For a thousand years the Christian world was threatened by their armies. Today the followers of Muhammad exercise great influence in the affairs of the world.

But Muhammad never claimed to be the founder of a religion, nor would any of his followers make this claim for him. He affirmed that what he did was to bring back again the ancient faith of Abraham and the older prophets. Other nations had had their prophets. Now God had given to the Arabs the last and greatest of the prophets, to whom he had revealed the fullness of his will in the

Qur‘an. Muhammad never claimed to have written the Qur‘an or any part of it. He received it direct from God (or as some traditions say, through the mediation of the archangel Gabriel).

The Qur‘an has existed from all eternity with God in the Arabic language; it is in every particular the utterance of God himself; there is no human element in it at all. Thus

Muslims claim for the Qur‘an something that Christians have never claimed for the Bible. Even the most conservative admit some human element in the Bible. If that is so, says the Muslim, how can the Bible be the word of God?

The miracle of the Bible is that it has been translated into 1,500 languages, and brings the same message in all. The miracle of the Qur‘an is that the Arabic language is so much a part of the revelation that this holy book cannot be translated. It has in fact been translated into many languages, but almost all of these translations have been made by Christians.

No partners

For the Muslim, the Qur‘an is the very voice of God himself. We have only to listen, and we shall know exactly who and what God is. We find him to be a very stern and alarming God. Mecca was a city much given to idolatry. Muhammad hated idols, so much of his preaching was controversial: hence the immense emphasis placed on the unity of God, his transcendence, his exaltation far above the world and everything that human beings can understand.

This unity is absolute. The worst of sins, according to the Muslim, is the sin of Shirk, saying that God has a partner — not only in the sense in which Christians say this, when they claim that Jesus is the Son of God, but in suggesting that God could in any way relate himself to anything outside himself.

It is said that there are ninety- nine beautiful names of God in the Qur‘an, but ‘God is love’ is not among them. It could not be, since love always implies relatedness, and God is too highly exalted to enter into any kind of relationship. He makes no revelation of himself to humanity; he reveals only his will. Even in paradise people will not know God as he is.

Muslims‘ favourite description of God is as the compassionate, the merciful. But this mercy is

Limited to believers. Nothing awaits the unbeliever except to be cast into hell at the day of judgement. In the Qur‘an there are fifty per cent more references to hell than to paradise. Unbelief is a grave sin, so the Muslim is entitled to wage holy war against the obstinate unbeliever who will not listen.

God’s will is inscrutable; everything is determined by it. But the ‘Muslim‘ — the word means, ’surrendered’ — has the proud consciousness of knowing the will of God in the Qur‘an and of carrying it out in every detail of life.

The Muslim lives night and day in an intense awareness of God, from whose gaze he cannot for a moment escape. The name of God is constantly on the lips of the Muslim — Bismillah, in the name of God; Inshallah, if God wills. Much of this no doubt is conventional; but it does represent also a deep awareness, from which Christians would do well to learn.

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