Yeah, that’s called shirk and Christians do just that, yet Muslims still consider them People of the Book. In Mughal India there were too many Hindus they couldn’t get rid of all of them, so they conveniently got some lawyers to make Hindus People of the Book.
Despite these strong criticisms of Christian trinitarian doctrine as well as the implication through juxtaposition in 5:72-73 that Christian beliefs in the divinity of Jesus, and in God as The third of three can be understood as a kind of shirk (ascribing partners unto God), Islamic Law never considered Christians to be “idolaters” (mushrikun) and accepted Christians’ own assertions of monotheistic belief…n. to 4:171
I also noticed in Arabic you can make a verb a noun by adding m- or t- in front of it like you do in Hebrew.
shirk - ascribing partners to God mushirkun - idolater
One of the interesting intersections between Christianity and Islam that nobody here has mentioned is that the stories of Jesus in the Quran have clear Gnostic influences, particularly the Infancy Gospel of Thomas but possibly also the stories about Jesus not really dying on the cross. The depiction of God in the Quran is definitely not Gnostic, but Muhammad seemed to be aware of some of the Gnostic myths about Jesus that would have still been floating around back then.
Is that just the long form name of the Gospel of Thomas? I’m not familiar with apocryphal or noncanonical texts.
Islam is a lot closer to Christianity than I had previously imagined. One of the Eastern Orthodox patriarchs called Islam a “Christian heresy.” I thought he was just being nice, but now I can see it.
No. The Infancy Gospel is attributed to Thomas and tells the story of Jesus’ infancy. The more well known Gospel of Thomas is a mystical dialogue. It’s well worth reading, although you should do so with commentary because it can be quite heavy going. It’s the most Buddhist-sounding of all early Christian texts and the Thomas in question went to India, so there could actually be some basis to the idea that it has some Buddhist influence.
Yeah, I don’t see this mentioned very often. The first time I heard about it was when I read a book by a Muslim-turned-Christian who pointed it out to delegitimise the Quran (“It doesn’t only plagiarise the Bible, it also plagiarises ridiculous Gnostic fairy tales!”). I then looked into the connection further and found it’s a legit theory. I think Gnosticism in general is rarely mentioned other than in the negative, which is a shame. I think it teaches us a lot about early Christianity. A lot of Christians would be blown away to learn what some of these early Christians who were pushed out of the mainstream were teaching. It’s weird that some of it still lives on in Islam.
Well, I’m glad he found Jesus, but this whole “Muhammad plagiarized the Bible,” shtick is ridiculous. The Quran mentions the Torah, the Psalms, and the Gospels. For all we know, he could’ve been right–maybe gnostics retained some of Jesus’ truths and proto-orthodox retained some of it.
I think it’s great, mostly because I like tradition. If we can find it in some Islamic practices, even more fascinating.
The Quran’s been a fun read. The language is beautiful; I’m familiar with most of the characters, as if there were prerequisites to the class and I’ve fulfilled them; it’s a linguistic feast, because of the similarities of the language to Hebrew.
Arab tribes were structured similarly to Germanic tribes, where loyalty to your kin or pseudo -kin was paramount.
In Medina, Muhammad tried to destroy this connection and make religion your first object of loyalty.
If you look around, he failed. The only successful Arab states are the really small ones.
Like Jordan Peterson said, religion has been a major force in uniting people–Christianity, Buddhism, and even Confucianism (even though in Confucianism your family is first).
When China put the Confucian Classics into the civil service exams, it unified the country intellectually.
O my people! Enter the Holy Land, which God has prescribed for you, and do not turn back, or you shall become losers.
Some commentators explicitly connect the Holy Land (al-ard al-muqaddasah) ordained for the Israelites (cf. 7:137) with Abraham–a term used widely today in Judeo-Christian contexts for this land, but one that is used only very rarely in the Bible itself.
This is a Semitic cognate. The Land in Hebrew is ha-aretz and holy is qadosh. But as mentioned, this word isn’t used in the Bible frequently.
I googled and found that Hebrew and Arabic share 60% lexical similarity. That seems too high, but the grammatical overlap appears to be much stronger.
