Jesus and Mu1ammad: new convergences

ORIGINAL
ARTICLE
Blackwell
Oxford,
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2009
Muslim
Hartford
UK
Publishing
World
Seminary
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Volume
: new99
convergences
January 2009

Jesus and Muhammad:

new convergences
Tim Winter
University of Cambridge
United Kingdom

pparently echoing the Eighth Commandment, the Prophet urges us to

shun the bearing of false witness, qawl al-zur.1 The loudest projections
of religion in Muslim and Christian communities today seem sometimes
to pay scant heed to this. But the prophetic judgment remains. Qawl al-zur
is one of the mubiqat, the mortal sins, literally the attitudes and practices
which cause destruction. No doubt the primary reference is to damnation
in the world to come; but it is hard to deny that in the form of religious
misrepresentation, the habit has supplied one of the most successful causes of
destruction in this world as well.
To speak in the shadow of Wim Bijlefeld2 is to seek solidarity with a
community committed to the rejection of this lethal practice. Listen to Mark
Swanson, the Lutheran theologian and Hartford alumnus, who recently
recorded his own indebtedness to Professor Bijlefeld in these words:
Some Christians [and in a note he explains that he has Bijlefeld
particularly in mind] have made it a point in their relationships with
Muslims to observe and listen to them with care and respect as they
practice and explain their faith, to read their scripture and other
foundational books with generosity of spirit, and then to attempt the
articulation of an understanding of Islam that Muslims can recognize as
correct and insightful.3

Strait indeed is the gate through which the theologian walks, when seeking
to represent the Other, particularly his or her own worlds most significant
Other, on its own terms, rather than on the terms of a theology of religions or
a map of salvation history which he or she finds comfortable. Yet courtesy to
strangers, as an Abrahamic virtue, must ultimately be about allowing them
to bear witness to themselves, while remaining, without compromise, in
commitment to ones own absolute covenant with God. For Christians and
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Muslims alike, this will mean some form of concurrent orthodoxy and
empathy; or even, mission and generosity.
In this article, I will be attempting to mobilize this approach to assess, and
perhaps reduce, one of the most recurrent polarities which beset MuslimChristian relations. This is the polarity which Muslims would refer to as lu f
and qahr Gods Gentleness and Rigour. In the Christian world there is a
very similar tension: the Biblical God has authored everything in creation,
separation as well as union, hell as well as heaven; thus Blakes rhetorical
question to the Tyger: Did He who made the lamb make thee? The theme is
ancient and principial, being an axiom of serious monotheistic metaphysics;
but it is also intensely topical. In Western countries, current affairs often seem
to be misread as a commentary on this dialectic, with Christianity, and hence
the West, identified with lu f, while Islam is with increasing frequency
associated with its complement. Conversely, in the Islamic world, the press is
filled with explanations of U.S. foreign policy that seek to locate it in the Bible
prophecy allegedly central to the worldview of White House staffers, while the
Islamic world is cast as its hapless and innocent victim.4
Of course a focus on this theme, while allowing reciprocity, will not be
tidily symmetrical. When seeking an account and a resolution of the kind
Bijlefeld commends, we need to begin with the fact that the lives of the two
founders, as recalled by their respective chroniclers and gospel-writers,
undeniably differed in their politics. Jesus is usually presented as a pacifist who
sought to transform the violence of his age into love, his divine infinity
sufficing to absorb the seemingly infinite wrongs of the world. Muhammad
seems to be portrayed as a warrior-prophet in the Old Testament mold, who
grasped the horns of tyranny and wrestled it to the ground, unifying and
liberating his people. Here a raft of polemics begins, of ancient origin, but
more lively now, perhaps, than ever. And it is to this contested point that
I would like to direct my attention in this article, pointing to at least one
underestimated convergence that we will uncover if we follow the injunction
to let the Other be integrally itself. This is an experiment in Bijlefelds mold: a
disciplined search for unexpected resemblances in the hope of overcoming
contempt.

Islam as Semitism: a needless polarity

Let us begin our diagnosis on the Christian side with Kenneth Cragg as he
insists on an all too common dichotomy: The Muhammadan decision, he
writes, is formative of all else in Islam. It was a decision for community, for
resistance, for external victory, for pacification and rule. The decision of the
Cross no less conscious, no less formative, no less inclusive was the
contrary decision.5

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For Cragg, the true religious vocation, to be religious, must be directed

inwardly to the sinning heart, a place which no social restoration can reach.
The Prophet, with his jihadist subjection of idolatrous enemies, represented
a regrettable reversion to an Old Testament model of social religion. That
religion exists under the sign of what Cragg calls Semitism. Exclusionary,
coercive and lawbound, Semitism is pledged to the Sisyphean task of changing
the world by changing its structures and its politics.6
Islam, catastrophically, repaired the Temple and tried to revive its dead
body, refusing to see that the Temple had come into new and true life as the
body of Christ. Hence the second Semitism must be, in Craggs terms, just as
burdensome as the first, and perhaps it is worse since it lacks the annunciatory
vocation of Israel. It is necrophiliac, its laws a decayed relic of an already
categorically-superceded legalism.7 The Dome of the Rock, superficially a sign
of the citys consummation under Ishmael, turns out to be in reality historys
greatest cul-de-sac, the realization of the mad dream of Julian the Apostate
to rebuild the Temple, restore the ancient order, and turn the clock back to a
state that in fact was pre-redemptory and hence unredeemed. The Christic
watershed in sacred history makes a nonsense of such conjuring with the dead
bones of the Law, as all things are made new through the spiritualizing of an
otherwise empty and ritually-obsessed covenant.
In his polemic against Semitism, Cragg is not alone in reverting to earlier
images of the Islam/Christianity relation as a simple instantiation of the law/
grace dichotomy, beloved of Reformed thinkers in particular.8 There is no
shortage of other conservatives who argue against any image of Jesus as a
political or social liberator on the grounds that this would be to re-Judaize him,
and ignores the central Pauline insight into the impossibility of redeeming the
structures of the world.9 Voices such as these, whose intensity might incline us
to speak of a Marcionite critique, seem rooted in an anti-Jewish trope that
most will regard as outmoded; but they no doubt have a future, having at least
some scriptural texts apparently on their side.
Muslims have not precisely reciprocated this dichotomizing mood.
For them, Jesus is, in a complex retrieval of Old Testament expectations,
messianically acknowledged. Yet the Quran does not allow him the element
of radical unexpectedness which Cragg, and perhaps St. Paul, describe. The
Jews were not deceived when they were instructed to await a deliverer who
would expect fidelity to their Law. Neither did God withhold from them, as
mere harbingers and proleptic signs, the fullness of His nature, since this
continues to be proclaimed in strictly monotheistic terms. The Muslim Jesus is
much less startling in his Jewishness than is the Christ of Pauls proclamation.
Set against Craggs polemic against Islams inability to imagine the worth
of passive suffering, there is a developed Muslim critique of a perceived
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Gospel pacifism. Take, for instance, the reproach voiced by Muhammad

Abduh which holds Christianity to be an escapist, otherworldly creed,
uninterested in resisting the depredations of tyrants.10 Eros and polis, he thinks,
are alien to Christianity, which is limited by a human ideal who failed to offer
a practical example for either.11 This is a not uncommon Muslim polemic, and
the kindred Semitism of Judaism seems to lay a similar charge: There is
nothing so physically and spiritually destructive as diverting our attention from
this world.12
The reproach to Christianity proposed by Abduh, which continues with
Abu Zahra, Suat Yldrm, Akhtar (in some moods) and others,13 that it creates
a duality in the world by dedicating the soul to God and allowing Caesars
empire to rule the body and society, has become a fond theme in modern
Muslim polemic. It is worth recalling, however, that classical Muslim writers on
Christianity such as al-Qarafi, Ibn al-Qayyim, and al-Tufi, seem untroubled by
the pacifism of the Gospels. Primitive Islam did, of course, offer many
instances of a valid pacific choice in the face of tyranny (the contrasting
decisions of al-Hasan and al-Husayn are entirely reputable among Sunnis as
well as among Shii believers). And the founder himself in the Medina period
sometimes chose truce, sometimes war and, at the culminating Conquest of
Mecca, reconciliation and absolution. Just as the Gospels are not purely pacifist
but seem to contain traces of Zealot memories, such as the cleansing of the
Temple,14 so too the Prophets biography has never been read as a
monothematic narrative of conflict and conquest.
Bijlefeld has acknowledged this:
there are [. . .] hopeful signs of a growing mutual understanding
between Muslims and Christians, especially in the field of social ethics.
News about the activities of Christians in Latin America and observations
in other parts of the world have made a growing number of Muslims
aware of the fact that there are Christians who see their involvement in
social, economic and political struggles as an integral part of their faith
commitment.15

Bijlefeld is not alone. Over the past few decades widely-followed

theological and cultural developments have implicitly mitigated the
absoluteness of an erstwhile Jesus verses Muhammad disparity. In the 1960s,
liberation theology and the blossoming of interest in Sufism seemed to bring
the religions ideals into a much more promising conversation; and Hans Kngs
recent book on Islam, which, identifying Islam as both mystical and liberative,
proposes a convergence of this kind, has been one interesting outcome.16 So
also is a recent essay by Leonardo Boff, whose central summons is to invite
Christians to consider the Prophets religion as an inspiration for freedomfighters, a providential sign of resistance to American fundamentalist hegemony.17

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Shabbir Akhtar, in his book on Cragg, is one Muslim theologian who

concedes that passive, suffering witness of the kind that so alienates the
Muslim conscience is not the only faithful outcome of the Gospels.18 In fact,
the trope of a Gospel-based liberation theology, including one which sanctions
force, is now quite regularly used by Christians as well as Muslims who seek
to reduce, if not dismiss, the Muhammad/Jesus disparity. Keith Ward and
Asghar Ali Engineer are only two significant examples.19
In modern Jewish reflection, the tension between these two possibilities,
the pacifist and the militant, the apolitical and the politicized, has also been
exercising conscientious theologians. Confronted with the desolation of a postShoah world and the painful ambiguities of Zion, does the rabbinical legacy
ratify challenge, distinction, and political engagement, or a radical detachment
in Torah-study? Both Christic and Muhammadan possibilities may be discerned
in the Hebrew Bible. Perhaps, too, they go back to its inaugural moment.
Joseph Soloveitchik, in his book The Lonely Man of Faith, contemplates the
two very different Adams outlined in the first two books of Genesis. Adam I,
he finds, is assertive, concerned to populate and to rule the earth, and to
establish Gods justice. Adam II is introspective, mystical, and submissive to
fate and to nature. Soloveitchik chooses to identify with the second of these,
specifically in the light of the apparent impossibility of redeeming the modern
world, but insists that Adam I is also a valid option. For the world to be healed,
he at last concludes, both Adams must be at work; and the believer, whichever
he chooses, must respect both as Judaically valid.20
Few Muslims or Christians would be comfortable with the most
obvious implication of this. Applied to our traditions, it would suggest a
complementarity between the two faiths, with the gospels urging a spirituallyrigorous political detachment, and the Quran righting the injustices of the
world; this would imply a mutual need and hence incompleteness that
theologians will find difficult.21 Christians, and not only liberationists, will want
to insist that their tradition can underpin a just civilisation, while Muslims have
certainly never acquiesced in the claim of a certain kind of Orientalism that the
Quran is not sufficiently spiritualizing.
Instead, both religions see their founders as Adamic restitutions of human
nature in its fullness. Christ is sufficient utterly to unravel original sin;
Muhammad represents al-insan al-kamil, the perfect human being; like Adam,
he has been taught all the Names. However tempting Soloveitchiks
suggestion of two Adams, and hence two prototypes, might seem, we
probably need to return to our original commitment to identifying
convergences between Jesus and Muhammad in the integrity of their own
traditions, and not through some radical suggestion that their missions were
complementary or mutually reliant. The ideal type must be a single person.
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The sustainability of this sort of integration has been enhanced in some

ways by certain recent turns in Biblical scholarship. Current advocates of the
quest for the historical Jesus, including such distinguished figures as Robert
Eisenman and James Tabor, point out the resemblance that their Jesus bears to
his Islamic portrayal, and the essential unity of his theology, as they discern it,
with that of the Quran. For Kng, the Ebionites, the Semitic Christians who
appear as Islams unmistakeable precursors, were a neglected apostolic and
hence valid possibility of the first Christian age; these thinkers, however, go
further to describe them as the authentic First Church, whose rehabilitation will
not only heal Christendoms historic rift with the Jews, but promises to
reconcile Islam as well. Here, for instance, are the thoughts of Professor Tabor,
published in 2007:
The Christianity we know from the Q source, from the letter of James,
from the Didache, and some of our other surviving Jewish-Christian
sources, represents a version of the Jesus faith that can actually unite,
rather than divide, Jews, Christians and Muslims. If nothing else, the
insights revealed through an understanding of the Jesus dynasty can
open wide new and fruitful doors of dialogue and understanding among
these three great traditions that have in the past considered their views
of Jesus to be so sharply contradictory as to close off discussion.22

And here is Jeffrey Btz:

It is more than intriguing that the Muslim understanding of Jesus is very
much in conformity with the first Christian orthodoxy the original
Jewish Christian understanding of Jesus.23

Taking Scripture Seriously: Beyond the Synoptics

and the Sira
There is clearly mileage and hope in the convergence suggested by the
liberation theology parallel, and by such New Testament investigations. Both
developments have, I believe, been under-registered in current MuslimChristian dialogue. However I propose to explore in the remainder of this
article a rather different path. This begins with what might be described as a
full-spectrum prophetology. This will involve respecting the classical norms of
scriptural interpretation and incorporating in particular the devotional and
eschatological episodes of the two scriptural records into the icons we paint
of the two founders in a way which, particularly in recent times, seems to have
been neglected or even rejected. My contention is that many Muslim and
Christian writers, in roughly equal measure, have marginalized dimensions of
their historic and scriptural faith for the sake of a perceived greater relevance
to modernity; and the loss of eschatological and chiliastic dimensions in

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particular has improperly concretized our images of Jesus and Muhammad in

a way that adds to our sense of polarity and division.
To follow this line of inquiry, lets begin with each faiths perception that
its founder stands in the perfect image of God. The Genesis text (1:26), picked
up in the New Testament and throughout subsequent Christian reflection, has
Adam made in Gods image. Christ, born without original sin, restores this
Adamic immaculacy. In Islam, the celebrated hadith that God made Adam
in His image24 has also been appropriated by theologians and by mystics
in particular as the basis of a doctrine of the perfect human being, whose
paradigmatic exemplar is Muhammad. For all their differences of content and
of emphasis, the Christian and Muslim theologies could concur that their
respective exemplum figures were mirrors reflecting the divine and that their
engagement with their earthly surroundings in some sense bodied forth
qualities of God.25 This seems promising, but before we can proceed further,
we need to be alert to the different deployment of the imago dei theme in the
two cultures.
We may pass rapidly over the exterior ethical signs of salvation.
Christianity commends an imitatio which is global, not detailed; this is the
precise point of the simultaneous transcendence and consummation of the
Law.26 Islam, by contrast, proposes the emulation of the sunna, which has an
exterior as well as an esoteric aspect. By abandoning ones own wilful patterns
in favor of the norms of the Prophetic model, the Muslim is conformed to a
perfection which is in turn a mirror of transcendence. Here Islam comes close
to what Soloveitchik calls halakhic man: the human who through ritual lives
in right relation with body, earth and Other, as well as with the spirit as such.27
So here, unsurprisingly, we find a discordance between the two strategies of
conformity to the celestial, although again, this need not be seen as a simple
matter of law against grace, but rather as a difference of intuition concerning
the true integration and partnership of the two.
If there is a formal, halakhic discrepancy, what of the inner process
of conformity to the divine pattern revealed in the two images? Firstly,
we note that both traditions like to speak of a restoration of Adams image by
paradoxically attributing pre-Adamic status to a final, eschatological exemplar.
Christ, of course, is the Word which was in the beginning,28 while canonical
hadith have the Prophet describe his own prophethood while Adam was still
between water and clay.29 At the Annunciation and at Mount Hira, the sunna
which is for emulation becomes itself.
In both cultures, the scriptural theme of the imitatio was gradually
adumbrated with neo-Platonic insights generally rooted in the cosmogony
of the Enneads. Here, the nous proceeds from the One as its image;
contemplating its origin, it perfects its likeness, and in the process engenders
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a third hypostasis, the psyche, and so on, to produce the familiar emanationist
model. At each step, an ontological degree is the image of its predecessor, and
its perfection, an imitatio of its own likeness, maintains the downward
dynamic of the system. At the lowest level of matter, the human creature is
characterized by a yearning to heal itself by conforming to the full image of
the higher souls, and thence to the One.30
This neo-Platonic way of thinking was not, of course, without its acute
difficulties for both Christianity and Islam. Yet the broad concept of the goal
of philosophy taking the form of a personal excellence which made souls
reflective of higher intelligibles was hugely influential, lying at the heart of
Avicennism, Thomism, and many of the mystical theologies that followed. The
momentous process whereby this model impacted on the monotheisms is
hugely complex and resistant to simple tracking. Nonetheless, it will help to
clarify our thoughts on this ontological imitatio if we summarize the position
of one or two theologians on each side, who found the notion important.
The first is Aquinas, in his remarks on the Divine Names of St Denys.
Drawing from time to time on Avicenna, Aquinas proposes that the perfected
human being stands at the summit of a necessarily graduated hierarchy whose
gradations and whose diversity reflect Gods conscious, personal will to be
manifest. The better the creature, the more fully it reflects and also promotes
the goodness of God, and hence imitates Him,31 so that, as Aquinas says, the
nearer a thing approaches the divine likeness, the more perfect it is.32 The
most perfect form in the material world is the human body; being the locus of
the soul, which is the lowest in the hierarchy of spiritual substances, it is
therefore connected ultimately to the divine nature. The saint hence exists
at the boundary between the physical and the metaphysical, and as such,
encompasses in a way unique in creation an image of the divine qualities, of
which Aquinas mentions being, life and knowledge.33 In fact, theomorphic
humanity is not theomorphic solely through intellect, as Augustine thought;
mans perfection is not merely cognitive but, more intrinsically, ontological in
origin.34 The entelechy of every quality is truly present within him, so that he
is a repetition, an analogia, of every aspect of the divine life, and experiences
also the richness of the inferior grades of existence. In true Plotinian vein,
every inferior form craves the qualities of those which are superior, yielding a
web and hierarchy of beauty which in the sublunary world culminates in the
human being who in turn occupies that position by virtue of a craving to be
conformed to the perfections of God. What makes Thomas account
compatible with Genesis is, of course, the insistence that both the emanation
and the return through the imitatio are directed by a conscious, personal will.
This grandiose understanding of the imago has been challenged in much
recent theology, particularly by those who wish to argue for God from man,

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rather than vice-versa. A first glance might suggest that Karl Barth has little to
do with medieval Platonizing reflection. In a long initial meditation on Genesis
1:26, he dismisses Aquinas discussion of an analogia entis as an invention of
Antichrist a bid a, we might say. The human creature as it is is not an
indication of God. Rather, it is Jesus, uniquely, the perfect human being, real
man, who indicates God.35 The Christian is called to live in his society when,
reconciled to Christ, he or she offers the image of a strangely human
person.36
In other ways, however, Barth seems to open up a way of tackling the
imago dei theme which will converge with Muslim definitions. Breaking with
the Reformers, Barth, at least in his later writings, will not accept that the Fall
was the loss of the imago dei. Gods original image cannot be broken. We all
retain, despite sin, a Gottebenbildlichkeit which takes the form of a hope for
the Creator, and specifically, for the divine-human entity who is Gods true
image to which our forms must conform.37 This helps to move Barth beyond
the convention initiated by Irenaeus, which confined the meaning of the
imago dei to the principle that man is rational as God is rational and to which
some modern thinkers are minded to revert. Here he is joined by Paul Tillich,
who although acknowledging the commensurability of the rational principle
as the first of his three theses about the imago dei, then goes on to add that
man is the image of God because in him the ontological elements are
complete and united on a creaturely basis, just as they are complete and united
in God as the creative ground.38
Turning now to Islamic thinkers, it is well-known that Ghazali was one
of the leading exponents of what the Prophet himself called al-takhalluq
bi-akhlaq Allah taking on the character-traits of God.39 In his book on
naming God, Ghazali appends beside each of the conventional ninety-nine
divine names some remarks on how human beings can conform themselves
to the divine perfection by adopting them. By knowing Gods attributes we
come to love them; and by loving them we are automatically characterized by
them in some way.40 As with Dionysus and Aquinas, this yields a hierarchy of
perfections defined by degrees of nobility and proximity. When the human
being is fully adorned by the names, he or she knows God and becomes a
divine agent in the world, as the Quran tells the Prophet: You did not throw
when you threw, but God threw (8:17).41 This process Ghazali frankly refers
to as taalluh, literally theosis.42
Ghazalis progression through the ninety-nine names acknowledges that
mans share of them differs radically from Gods share. Yet insofar as they are
qualities of perfection, each one makes its demands upon us. The primary
name, al-Rahman, the Compassionate, and its subordinate, al-Rahim, the
Merciful, require us gently to guide people away from occasions of Gods
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anger and to empathize with the poor and weak. Likewise, when God calls
himself al-Wadud, the Loving, humans on the path to sainthood must, out of
love, prefer others to themselves. This is indicated prophetically in the famous
hadith: Be joined to those who shun you, give to those who withhold from
you, and forgive those who wrong you.43 Taalluh makes us perfect images
of the love and selflessness of God.
Ghazali has rather more difficulty pursuing his programme with names
such as al-Baith, the Raiser of the Dead. This, of course, is a purely divine
quality, and hence he must adopt a metaphorical approach: whoever lifts
another, as he says, out of ignorance to knowledge has already created him
anew and revivified him to a blessed life.44 Yet he resists absolutely the notion
that it is only the gentler perfections of God which are to be the means of his
theosis. God is, for instance, al-Muqsi, the Equitable. Here Ghazali insists that
humans must follow suit. The establishment of justice in the world, he adds,
is a sacred pursuit to be separated entirely from self-interest. As he writes:
those men who have the greatest share in this name are those who insist
first of all on justice from themselves for others, and then from one for
another, but forbear demanding it from another for themselves.45

This recalls the disinterested struggle of the Prophet, who brought justice to
his people for their sake, not for his own.
A modern-day theologian who has reflected on the imago dei topos
is Yahya Michot. Borrowing from Ibn Taymiyya but resisting Wahhabi
interpretations, Michot represents well the moderate Hanbalite turn in modern
Islam, which in an almost Barthian vein seeks to defend the divine
transcendence against the possible reduction implied in the hadith text about
Adams creation. For Michot, the Prophet is perfect human being (al-insan
al-kamil) not in virtue of some ontic correspondence to qualities in God,
but because he became, in his everyday life and in his prophetic leadership
of his community, a kind of living Koran, offering a perfect realization and
implementation of the Koranic ethics. The imago dei hadith is to be
interpreted metaphorically: no human type can be an image of the divine, but
it can be a channel for a theophany in the sense that the divine ethical
purposes are fully served and manifested in the one who does heavens will.46
Although in the cases of Barth and Michot, both emblematic of a modern
scripturalizing turn against mysticism, the sense in which an ordinary human
can reflect Gods nature is somewhat occluded, the taalluh principle in both
traditions is still a helpful way of progressing, not least because it seems to be
grounded in evidently important scriptural texts. Of course, the doctrine of
Incarnation separates the two, with Islam here assuming that the finitum non
capax infiniti maxim must make any hulul, indwelling, of the divine in the

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human intolerably paradoxical. Ghazali, explicitly critiquing what he sees

as Christian excess, is anxious to insist that what humanity acquires of the
attributes is not a perfect likeness of them, for to attribute omniscience and
omnipotence to a human entity would be to divinize him.47 As Khafaji puts it,
acquiring the qualities of God resembles the kindling of a torch from a fire:
one does not take the fire itself.48 In the Christian case, by contrast, Christ is
the very Bild of God; the perfected Christian is no more than His Ebenbild, a
correspondence of the unlike. This dizzyingly high Christology ensures that
on one fundamental Christian tenet we are far from Muslim conceptions.
Christ, as God, is sui generis; for Islam, by contrast, there have been multiple
perfect exemplars, although they are not divine.
There are further dissonances. Perhaps Islam was more congenial to the
neo-Platonic system than was Christianity, given its non-triune understanding
of ultimate reality.49 Perhaps, even, this helps to explain why mysticism often
seemed more salient in Islamic cultures than in the Latin West (although any
attempt to demonstrate this claim would lead us far afield). But it is clear that
a mainstream discourse of each religion has accepted an idea of conformity
to Gods qualities as the fundamental dynamic in the differentiation and
hierarchalizing of being.50 Moreover, both agree that their respective founders
are paradigmatic. And as such, it is axiomatic that both reflect the full range if
not the fullness of Gods qualities, the rigorous as well as the beautiful,
mysterium tremendum et fascinans, or, in Ibn Aa Allahs image, His right
and left hands.51
At this juncture I want to invoke the full-spectrum prophetology which I
promised earlier. Current interfaith observations are often limited, I believe, by
what may ultimately be a secularized or rationalizing appropriation of the lives
of Jesus and Muhammad. In the case of the latter, we read the Sira, but not
the Shamail, and not the vast scriptural and later material about the Prophets
eschatological role.52 Once the Prophet has been impoverished in this way,
either by Muslims or Christians, he is then compared to a Christ who has
likewise been massively stripped of his eschatological glory. What we are left
with is the Sira contrasted with the Synoptics; and on this level we might well
wish to agree with Craggs gloomy diagnosis of an irreducible disparity.
What would happen if, without abdicating our critical historical duties, we
took a little more seriously the fuller iconography normative not only in
premodern times, but among many conservative believers today? Let us briefly
remind ourselves of what the two founders are predicted to accomplish at the
eschaton.
Firstly, the Prophet. Christians focused on the Sira, with its dimensions of
rigor and justice, may not immediately grasp why the hadith choose to entitle
him habib God: Gods Beloved.53 His entire eschatological role, however, is
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to manifest Gods forgiveness and mercy and to represent the principle that
Gods mercy outstrips His wrath.54 Some of the best-known of all hadiths
describe humanity on judgement-day, terrified by divine justice and wrath,
making their way from prophet to prophet, begging for their intercessory
prayers. The Prophet Muhammad, lord of Adams children, is standing at
Gods right hand, wearing a celestial robe. Then:
I go before the Throne, and fall down in prostration before my Lord.
Then God inspires in me such praises and great glorification of Him as
were never inspired in anyone before me, and it is said: O Muhammad!
Lift up your head! Ask, and you will be answered; plead for intercession,
and it will be granted you. So I raise my head and say: My nation! My
nation! And I am told: O Muhammad! Bring in those of your nation for
whom there need be no reckoning by the right-hand Gate of Heaven!
The remaining Gates shall be for the others.55

The gate through which he brings sinners turns out to be wider than that
which is between [. . .] Mecca and Bostra in Syria.
And another hadith reports that some of his disciples were discussing the
various scriptural titles of the prophets; whereupon the Prophet told them:
I heard your discoursing and your wonderment that Abraham should
have been Gods Friend: it was so. And that Moses should have been
Gods Intimate: it was so. And that Jesus should have been Gods Spirit
and Word: it was so. And that Adam should have been chosen by God:
it was so. I am the Beloved of God, and I do not boast. I shall carry the
banner of praise on the Day of Arising, and I do not boast. I shall be the
first to intercede, and the first to be granted Intercession on the Day of
Arising, and I do not boast. I shall be the first to shake the door-rings of
Heaven, and God shall open its doors for me, and I shall enter with
those of the believers that were poverty-stricken, and I do not boast.56

These solid scriptural foundations, surviving an early tussle with Mutazilite

refusal to allow the notion of intercession, have made the principle of the
Prophets unique mercy at the Judgement an article of faith, a flagship doctrine
of Asharism, Maturidism and Hanbalism alike. Unsurprisingly, the diffusion
of the Muhammad of Mercy motif in devotional literature was even more
comprehensive. To take just a single example, very few Turks have not heard
the famous lines of Sleiman elebi:
Hail
Hail
Hail
Hail
Hail
Hail

32

to
to
to
to
to
to

thee!
thee!
thee!
thee!
thee!
thee!

O
O
O
O
O
O

nightingale of Beautys bower!

Loved One of the Lord of Power!
Mercy to the worlds, to all!
Pleader for the folk who fall!
Refuge of the rebel race!
Helper of the portionless!57
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Jesus and Mu1ammad: new convergences

The reciprocation of this theme is readily found in the Bible and in a rich
seam of subsequent Christian devotion. Although predictions of Jesus
sternness at the end of time are certainly present in the Gospels and St. Paul,58
it is the Book of Revelation which serves as the decisive counterpoint to the
Gospels concern with Jesus meekness. In this text, the principle of forceful
restitution is vindicated: Gods vengeance, which in the New Testaments
vision can only occasionally unfold in the here-and-now, will dominate the
scene at the apocalypse.59 The theme of divine vengeance recurrent in the Old
Testament is here brought to its climax, not as a simple reversion to Judaism,
but as the final manifestation of Gods justice through Christ, who is portrayed
as the instrument of Gods punishment of oppressors and unbelievers.60
Muhammad Abduh, Shabbir Akhtar, and other Muslims insistent on the
inadequacy of the New Testament portrayal of Jesus perfection make no
reference at all to the Book of Revelation, nor to the normative status of the
doctrine of Christs rigor, as he returns to judge, to condemn, and to exercise
his fully deiform quality of Pantocrator. A needless polarity thus ensues which
is no less damaging than Christian images of a Muhammad in whom the
principle of Rigor is foremost.
Reading Revelation in our context, a certain amount of cautious filtration
is needful. The current fad of popular Bible prophecy has fixed on the
violence of the text and ignored earlier tendencies favoring an allegorical
reading. Take, for instance, Hal Lindseys novel Blood Moon, whose
culminating scene, set after an Israeli nuclear attack on Arab capitals, has Jesus
appearing to confront a Palestinian army marching on Jerusalem. Confronted
with the deadly rays beaming from the eyes of Jesus, within seconds their
flesh literally melted away while they stood on their feet, their eyes burst in
their sockets and their tongues rotted away in their mouths.61
In Lindseys vision, Jesus is transformed into a kind of Arnold
Schwartzenegger figure, Jesus the Terminator; and this will certainly contrast
with the Muhammad who pleads for mercy for the nations. Here a casual
reader would conclude that the two exemplars have exchanged roles entirely.
However our proposed full-spectrum prophetology need not end in such a
fearful symmetry.
In what sense can the undoubted rigor of the Jesus of Revelation
constructively serve our hopes for a convergence? It may help to begin with
the reflection that Revelation is already an Islamically-suggestive book, and
there are some, like John Wansbrough, who would like to remove the
boundary between the Muslim scripture and the large and febrile world of
Jewish and Christian apocalyptic. Like the Quran, Revelation is a book of
prophecy (1:3, 22:7, 10, 18 19, 19:10), supplied to a prophet by a mighty angel
(22:16). It is strongly Semitic, drawing from the imagery of Jewish and
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extra-canonical Semitic myth.62 It is filled with warnings, threats and

admonitions, against sexual vice and commercial malpractice in particular.63 It
seems to propose salvation through works rather than grace. And its Christ is
not unambiguously divine, but is more like an angel who visits punishment in
the name of the Father.
The early Church, notably including Irenaeus and Lactantius, interpreted
Revelation in a literal way, but even the so-called Tyconian qualification of
this through Augustines idea that the millennium is, properly speaking, the
church itself, does not do away with the texts focus on Jesus as instrument of
divine rigor and judgement.64 His new advent is unmistakeably a violent
settling of accounts. As Paul Spilsbury puts it, The Lamb cannot be separated
from the themes of divine wrath;65 those who worshipped the Beast shall be
tormented with fire and sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and in the
presence of the Lamb.66 Lindsey is not so far from the common Reformation
reclamation of carnal readings found among many Lutherans, Calvinists and
Anabaptists. In complex ways, the Reformation retrieval of the apostolic
exegesis of the book could lead to political action, and to the use of
Revelations passages about the martial Jesus as proof-texts for just war
theories: this is partly why Hussite leaders, in particular, could cry that Any
one of the faithful is accursed who holds his sword back from the blood of the
adversaries of Christs Law.67
Critics from Augustine to Cragg would no doubt regard this radical
evangelical jihad as a misreading of the text, or at least a misinformed
toleration of its Semitic purpose (Bossuet calls such Protestants Judaizers68 ).
We need not pass judgement, beyond noting that despite Craggs strictures on
Semitism, the mere fact or supposition of Jewishness is not an occasion for
abuse in modern Christian theology. Again, my point is simply that this Semitic
coda to the Bible need not be seen as a kind of early Quran, a regrettable
reprise of an abrogated sort of relationship with God. Instead, perhaps its
presence is providential, a sign that even after the evangelists and Paul have
had their say, the God of justice who speaks so insistently in the Hebrew Bible
retains a role. The context is of course Roman persecution of the Church in
Asia Minor. Caesar will ultimately be crushed with the iron sceptre and the
plagues unleashed by the Lamb. Here Jesus, who in the Gospels embodied
only the divine beauty, jamal, shows his fully theomorphic perfection by
adding the qualities of jalal: Gods rigor and justice.
Stepping back from this unconscionably large set of generalizations about
the eschatological missions of Jesus and Muhammad, we may propose the
conclusion that once we have made due allowance for sitz im leben, the two
founders are not icons of a Law-Spirit dichotomy; neither represents in an
unbalanced way either the left or the right hand of God. During the end-times,

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Jesus and Mu1ammad: new convergences

when we see face-to-face or, as the Quran has it, basarukal-yawma hadid
(your vision this day is sharp 50:22), the fully theomorphic nature of the
two perfect beings becomes universally plain. As God is Love and also
Severity, so too are all His messengers, and the two characteristically chiliastic
figures display this well.
Yet mercy has the last word. While Christ, bodying forth the fullness of
God, must represent Rigour as well as Mercy, Mercy predominates. Ibn Arabi
insists that wrath derives from mercy and is dependent upon it. God says:
My Mercy encompasses all things (7:156, 40:7), whereas wrath represents
the perfection of Gods decree in the case of certain specific entities and
conditions.69 And with Muhammad, Sakhawi tells us that Gods blessing upon
the Prophet-mediator, mentioned in the Quran, is Gods constant promise:
Holy! Holy! My mercy outstrips My wrath!70

Endnotes
1. Bukhari, Wasaya, 23; Muslim, Iman, 145.
2. This article has been adapted from a presentation Dr. Winter made at Hartford
Seminary in Hartford Connecticut in September, 2007. Dr. Winter presented as the
Seminarys Bijlefeld Lecturer.
3. Mark Swanson, Thinking Through Islam, in Word and World 22 (2002), 270.
4. See Donald Wagner and Hassan Haddad, All in the Name of the Bible (Brattleboro
VT: Amana, 1985); Waleed Aly, People Like Us: How arrogance is dividing Islam and the
West (Sydney: Picador, 2007); Aftab Ahmad Malik (ed.), With God on Our Side: Politics and
Theology of the War on Terrorism (London: Amal, 2006); ule Akbulut Albayrak, Hristiyan
Fundamentalizmi (Istanbul: Etkileim, 2007).
5. Kenneth Cragg, The Call of the Minaret (New York, Oxford University Press,
1956), 93.
6. Kenneth Cragg, Semitism: The Whence and the Where. How Dear Are your
Counsels (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2005).
7. For Craggs understanding of the supersession of the Law, see Semitism, 77; also
his Muhammad and the Christian: a question of response (London: Darton, Longman and
Todd, 1984), 1256, where his definition of Semitism allows him to reduce prophecy to
education and command. An energetic refutation of the identification of Judaism with
legalism may be found in E. P. Sanders, Jesus, Ancient Judaism, and Modern Christianity:
the quest continues, in Paula Fredriksen and Adele Reinhartz (eds.), Jesus, Judaism and
Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament after the Holocaust (Louisville and
London: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 3155.
8. A good example of this sub-Marcionite tendency is Risto Jukko, Trinity in Unity
in Christian-Muslim relations (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 165: revelation in Islam is basically a
legal code through which God legislates over all human affairs. Islam demands above all
obedience and religious action, not theological analysis. That the references given for this
statement are all to non-Muslim sources is another sign of the authors traditionalist
approach. See also p.159, where revelation is described either as personal or literal, again
reviving an ancient theme in Christian polemic against Judaism.
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9. For Craggs critique of liberation theology see Kenneth Cragg, The Lively
Credentials of God (London: SPCK, 1995), 15; for a not insignificant allied voice see John L.
Allen Jr., Cardinal Ratzinger: the Vaticans enforcer of the faith (London: Continuum, 2005),
13174.
10. Muhammad Abduh, al-Islam wal-Nasraniya maalilm walmadaniya (Cairo:
Dar al-Manar, 1373AH), 245 (al-asl al-thalith).
11. For Christianity and eros see Frithjof Schuon, Christianity/Islam: Essays in Esoteric
Ecumenicism (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1985), 1123.
12. Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of
America, 5743/1983), 41; see also pp.43 and 93.
13. Muhammad Abu Zahra, Muhadarat fil-Nasraniyya (Cairo: Mabaat al-ulum,
1942); Suat Yldrm, Mevcut Kaynaklara Gre Hristiyanlk (Istanbul: Ik, 2005), 245.
14. S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1967), 3316; for a short but nuanced discussion see Oscar Cullman, Jesus and the
revolutionaries (New York: Harper and Row, 1970), 3150. Cragg (Semitism, 66) deals with
the Cleansing of the Temple incident by claiming that Jesus intention was to attract the
attention of the Zealots to his action only the more dramatically to repudiate it. It was the
example he offered of what he would not do.
15. Willem A. Bijlefeld, Christian-Muslim Relations: A Burdensome Past, a
Challenging Future, in Word and World 16 (1996), 127.
16. Hans Kng, Islam: past, present, future (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007), 3245.
17. Leonardo Boff, Fundamentalism, Terrorism and the Future of Humanity
(London: SPCK, 2006), 434.
18. Shabbir Akhtar, The Final Imperative: an Islamic Theology of Liberation (London:
Bellew, 1991), 915.
19. Keith Ward, Muhammad from a Christian Perspective, in Norman Solomon,
Richard Harries and Tim Winter (eds.), Abrahams Children: Jews, Christians and Muslims
in Conversation (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2005), 12431; for his critique of Cragg
see p.130; Asghar Ali Engineer, Islam and Liberation Theology: Essays on Liberative
Elements in Islam (Delhi: Sterling, 1990). Nor is the charge of a politically-detached
Christianity as applicable as some Muslims have imagined: it is not irrelevant that the
Emperor Constantine was revered as the Thirteenth Apostle, and as a saint, by the Eastern
Church (Charles Matson Odahl, Constantine and the Christian Empire [London and New
York: Routledge, 2004], 26884).
20. Joseph Soloveitchik, The Lonely Man of Faith (New York: Doubleday, 1992).
21. See, however, the view of Khalid Muhammad Khalid, Maan alal-ariq:
Muhammad wal-Masih (Cairo: Dar al-Kutub al-haditha, 1958), 182, where Jesus, identified
with Mercy, and Muhammad, identified with Justice, are cited as the two wings of peace.
It is not clear how Khalid means to incorporate this typology theologically.
22. James D. Tabor, The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family,
and the Birth of Christianity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007), 2878.
23. Jeffrey J. Btz, The Brother of Jesus and the Lost Teachings of Christianity
(Rochester VT: Inner Traditions, 2005), 186. See also Robert Eisenman, James the Brother of
Jesus: Recovering the True History of Early Christianity (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), 3,
1645 and passim; also Heikki Risnen, The Portrait of Jesus in the Quran: reflections of
a Biblical scholar, Muslim World 70 (1980), 127: some layers of the NT bear a striking
resemblance to the Quranic portrait of Jesus.
24. Bukhari, Istidhan, 1; Muslim, Birr, 115. For this hadith see Daniel Gimaret, Dieu
limage de lhomme: les anthropomorphismes de la sunna et leur interprtation par les
thologiens (Paris: Cerf, 1997), 128135.

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Jesus and Mu1ammad: new convergences

25. In the context of kalam, the hadith was thus interpreted by Razi and others;
see Gimaret, pp.1312; there was also a rich Sufi appropriation.
26. And because the object of the imitatio, Christ himself, manifests a tendency
towards the idealistic simplification of terrestrial contingencies (Schuon, 100).
27. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man.
28. See also Col 1:15: Christ is the firstborn of all creation; Rev 3:14: Christ is
the beginning of creation.
29. Bukhari, Adab, 119; Muslim, Fadail al-sahaba, 28.
30. Plotinus, Enneads, V, 2, 1; VI, 3, 7; V, 3, 8.
31. Fran ORourke, Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (Leiden:
E. J. Brill, 1992), 262.
32. In ORourke, 263.
33. Ibid., 26567.
34. Ibid., 269.
35. Wolf Krtke, Karl Barths anthropology, in John Webster (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Karl Barth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 15979;
p.167.
36. Ibid., 174.
37. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, tr. J. W. Edwards et al., III/i (Edinburgh: T. and
T. Clark, 1958), 1901.
38. Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology (London: Nisbet, 1953), I, 288.
39. David B. Burrell and Nazih Daher (trs.), Al-Ghazali, The Ninety-Nine Beautiful
Names of God, al-Maqsad al-asna fi sharh asma Allah al-husna (Cambridge: Islamic Texts
Society, 1992), 149.
40. Ibid., 31.
41. Ibid., 47.
42. Ibid., 52.
43. Cited in ibid., 119.
44. Ibid., 123.
45. Ibid., 142.
46. Yahya Michot, The Image of God in Humanity from a Muslim Perspective, in
Abrahams Children, 16374.
47. Ghazali, Ninety-Nine Names, 151.
48. Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Khafaji, ed. Muhammad Abd al-Qadir Aa, Nasim
al-riyad fi sharh shifa al-Qadi lyad (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiya, 1421/2001), I, 167.
49. Nietzsche the anti-Christian has other reasons to consider the Prophet as an
Arab Plato: Ian Almond, The New Orientalists: Postmodern Representations of Islam from
Foucault to Baudrillard (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), 189.
50. One might add the observation that litanies such as the Christe eleison and the
Jesus Prayer are paralleled by the prayer upon the Prophet, which is not a prayer for him,
since his excellence renders that impossible, but is rather, as a hadith states, a means
whereby we receive Gods own salat, which is mercy (Razi and Amidi), or absolution
(Urmawi, Baydawi, Qarafi). See Muhammad ibn Abd al-Rahman al-Sakhawi, al-Qawl
al-Badi fi l-salat alal-Habib al-Shafi (Beirut: Muassasat al-Rayyan, 1422/2002),
512, 83.
51. Ibn Aa Allah al-Iskandari, tr. Scott Kugle, The Book of Illumination. Kitab
al-Tanwir fi Isqa al-Tadbir (Louisville KY: Fons Vitae, 2005), 1920; cf. Quran 38:75. For
a detailed investigation of the two hands trope see Sachiko Murata, The Tao of Islam:
A Sourcebook on Gender Relationships in Islamic Thought (Albany NY: State University
of New York Press, 1992), 81116.
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52. Kngs Islam has this limitation; but it is present in modern Muslim biographies
also: a quite representative example in English would be the Life of Muhammad by
Muhammad Husayn Haykal (18881956), tr. I. al-Faruqi (London: Shorouk, 1983).
53. For the title see Tirmidhi, Manaqib, 1; Abu Daud, Muqaddima, 8; cf. Abu Hamid
al-Ghazali, tr. T. J. Winter, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife (Cambridge:
Islamic Texts Society, 1989), 216.
54. Bukhari, Tawhid, 15; Muslim, Tawba, 14.
55. Ghazali, Remembrance of Death, 214.
56. Cited in ibid., 216.
57. E. J. W. Gibb, A History of Ottoman Poetry (London: Luzac, 1900), vol. I, 246.
58. For instance Matt 25:316; 2 Thess 2:4.
59. Summarizing his understanding of the New Testament teaching on vengeance,
H. G. L. Peels concludes: In the enactment of present vengeance, God will make use of
the government [. . .] (Rom 13:4). The same thought of official-juridical vengeance
occurs in 1 Pet. 2:14. The vengeance of God can be manifested in the present (cf. Luke
21:22), but is especially a matter of the future. (H. G. L. Peels, The Vengeance of
God: the meaning of the root NQM and the function of the NQM-Texts in the context
of divine revelation in the Old Testament [Leiden: Brill, 1995], 310).
60. Peels, 312: The last book of the Bible is not a fall-back into Judaism but a
powerful conclusion of the preaching of the Old Testament and the New Testament [. . .]
the New Testaments proclamation stands in the same line as the vengeance theme in the
Old Testament. See also T. Longman, The Divine Warrior: The New Testament Use of an
Old Testament Motif, Westminster Theological Journal 44 (1982), 290307; S. H. Travis,
Christ and the Judgment of God: Divine Retribution in the New Testament (Basingstoke:
Marshall Pickering, 1986).
61. Hal Lindsey, Blood Moon (Palos Verdes, CA: Western Front, 1996), 313.
62. Frederick David Mazzaferri, The Genre of the Book of Revelation from
a Source-Critical Perspective (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1989), 3946, 52.
63. Mazzaferri, 189; the idiom originates with Quran 18:3.
64. For the early evolution see Bernard McGinn, Visions of the End: Apocalyptic
Traditions in the Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), 27.
65. Paul Spilsbury, The Apocalypse, 136146 of Markus Bockmuehl and James
Carleton Paget (eds.), Redemption and Resistance: The Messianic Hopes of Jews and
Christians in Antiquity (London and New York: T.&T. Clark, 2007), 141.
66. Rev 14:10.
67. Bernard McGinn, Wrestling with the Millennium: Early Modern Catholic Exegesis
of Apocalyse 20, in Abbas Amanat and Magnus Bernhardsson (eds.), Imagining the End:
Visions of Apocalyse from the Ancient Middle East to Modern America (London: I. B. Tauris,
2002), 267.
68. Ibid., 166.
69. William Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn Arabis Metaphysics of
Imagination (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1989), 21, 23. Moreover, the
imitatio is governed throughout by the principle of love, for the saint acquires Gods
perfections out of love for Him, while He then loves the saint because of the presence of
these perfections (Chittick, 2845).
70. Sakhawi, 52. For this unifying theme see Willem Bijlefeld, Eschatology: Some
Muslim and Christian Data, Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 15 (2004), 54.

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