Christian Views of Muhammad since the Publication of Kenneth Cragg’s Muhammad and the Christian,A Question of Response in 1984

Muhammad Appropriated Ideas from Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, Perhaps Without Realizing Their Origin

Peter Cotterell, English Baptist missiologist, has given an assessment of Muhammad in his 2011 biography, Muhammad. The man who transformed Arabia. From the outset, Cotterell is candid about his unwillingness to use the title ‘prophet’ for Muhammad. ‘I believe that Muhammad was a remarkable man, with a breathtaking range of gifts. Whether he was a prophet or not is for the reader to judge.’ ⁹ Despite this referral of judgement to the reader, the conclusion to the book gives the latter solid guidance for coming to a decision. Since Muhammad lacked formal education he could only have a rudimentary knowledge of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, which accounts for his ability to appropriate details from each religion without him ‘realizing their origin’. ¹⁰ But this also resulted in his failure to appreciate the true conceptions of Christianity.

Muhammad seems to have known nothing of the teaching of Jesus, and he makes no reference to Paul or his letters which so clearly set out the Christian understanding of Jesus and the centrality of the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. ¹¹

When the Jews in Medina pointed out to Muhammad that the Biblical stories he recited contained additions and alterations to the original version he could have admitted that there was a problem ‘and look for further instruction’. But he preferred to accuse the Jews of ‘wrongly interpreting or actually corrupting the text of their scriptures’. ¹² If the reader adds to this the awareness that Muhammad stood watching while 600 men from the Jewish Qurayza clan were beheaded in Medina then the conclusion must be that he ‘was not a man of peace’. ¹³ He may have achieved the creation of the umma, but ‘the commitment of that umma to a political agenda founded on violence, and the provision of a backward-looking social code was his most profound and significant failure’. ¹⁴

Muhammad Initially Thought He Was Preaching the Same Message as Jews and Christians but He Ended Up Imposing Islam

English Anglican Ida Glaser has recently argued that Muhammad believed that he was promoting the same message as Jews and Christians through the Biblical accounts that he heard and used. In the early Meccan years, his call to worship one God must have seemed to him to be the message that he was drawn to from listening to Jews and Christians.

Muhammad’s mission was based on calling people to the one God and, at least in the Meccan years, he appears to have been driven by a genuine desire for a monotheism continuous with that of the Jews and Christians. How acceptable his attempts were to God is not, I think, a question that we can answer, but I think we can be sure that, as with Cain, God was speaking to him at some stages, quite possibly through dreams or visions. At the very least, he was getting the opportunity to hear God through the biblically based material that he evidently knew. ¹⁵

However, Muhammad ended up by alienating both Jews and Christians after ‘taking power into his own hands’ in Medina. Like Cotterell, Glaser sees Muhammad as taking sincerely wrong decisions as his life developed, and thus moving further and further away from the voice of God that initially drew him. ¹⁶ Like Cotterell too, she does not want to be involved in stating categorically that Muhammad was not a prophet, but she does not use this title for him. Indeed the implication is that Muhammad’s development of political power in Medina diminishes the ‘prophetic’ possibilities of the Meccan period. ‘The move from Mecca to Medina signaled the development of Islam as a political identity, together with the power implications that have been part of most manifestations of Islam ever since’. ¹⁷ She illustrates the danger involved in this transformation of Muhammad from leader of a tiny sect in Mecca to leader of a whole urban community in Medina.

Muhammad does not seem to have made the link between sacrifice and forgiveness . . . As Muhammad developed political power, he also took on the role of administering judgement, moving towards the position where he saw it as the role of the believers even to kill unbelievers in some circumstances. ¹⁸

The path that Muhammad took proves that he was not one who brought revelation from God. In any case, from the perspective of the Bible there can hardly be another revelation from God when his word has been fully declared in Christ. But ‘if we were to allow another revelation after Christ, this could not be it’. ¹⁹ In the final analysis, the revelation that Jesus brought was that God’s kingdom is established through his death on the cross to redeem humanity from their rebellion against his rule. On the contrary, the message that Muhammad brought was that God’s kingdom is established by submission to Muhammad’s rule. ‘We cannot follow both the way of Muhammad, who established Islamic rule in Arabia, and the way of Jesus, who went to the cross in Jerusalem. There is a choice to be made.’ ²⁰

Evaluation

Cotterell’s assessment of Muhammad as a poorly equipped borrower of other people’s religious traditions who hardly knew where the notions were coming from is another traditional Christian response to the messages he brought. Yet the tone of the Qur’an is quite often critical of people from other religious traditions for failing to pay attention to the truth contained in them. In other words, the messages of Muhammad from the earliest to the latest contain a strongly worded critique of people who fail to honour God as they should. They ought to know better than to worship other beings, spiritual or human. Muhammad did not need to be able to ‘read’ the scriptures of Christians to commence an attack on their spiritual dependence on Jesus. It would have been obvious to Muhammad that they were failing to give God their exclusive worship by the way they performed their prayers in Jesus’ name, or confessed their faith in Jesus as the Son of God. Of course, if it is insisted that Muhammad had no direct experience of Christian worship, or of Christian testimony, then this argument falls. However, it is surely not credible that he had no awareness of the language used by those few Christians in Mecca that he is said to have talked to; Waraqa, his wife’s cousin and Jabr, the Christian slave who owned a market stall. ²¹

Glaser’s distinction between the early Muhammad who believed he was in the path of the Jews and Christians in proclaiming the oneness of God and the post-Hijrah Muhammad who imposed Islam on Jews and Christians is also a traditional approach among non-Muslim interpreters of Muhammad. Cragg asks for a new appreciation of the message of Muhammad but Glaser dissents from his enthusiasm for the Prophet of the Qur’an. For her, Muhammad was increasingly critical of Jews and Christians, particularly when he moved to Medina. But the same criticism of Jews and Christians applies to the Meccan era as well as the Medinan as argued in the previous paragraph. So we would have to conclude that Muhammad’s agreement with Biblical accounts he heard from Jews and Christians in Mecca did not mean that he identified with either religious community for very long. On the contrary, he appeared to distance himself from those who actually practiced Judaism or Christianity rather quickly upon hearing the voice of Gabriel, and spent much of his energy pointing out to them just how they were failing to honour the revelation given to them in the past.

Many People Have Learned to Worship God through Muhammad’s Message and Example

Jacques Jomier (d. 2008), a French Dominican father who spent 20 years in Egypt, hesitates to compare Muhammad with prophets found in the Bible. The latter brought the word of God in the form of messages received directly from Him, but he does not believe that Muhammad is in the same category. ‘If Christians were to accept the prophecy of Muhammad in the strict sense, they would have to go against everything they are told by the weightiest religious documents in their possession.’ ²² Muhammad’s basic message has connections with those messages we find recorded as coming from Biblical prophets, but this is explained by his reliance on them. ‘In reality, the message which he preached grafted simplified biblical or para-biblical ideas on to an Arab stem.’ ²³ However, the additions and subtractions he made to the prophetic language he heard undermine the purity of the original version. Jomier argues that Christians should bypass the discussion of the prophethood of Muhammad in favour of affirming his spiritual teaching. He offers an example of how to do this from his experience of representing the Catholic Church in dialogue with Muslims.

During a meeting between Muslims and Christians at al-Azhar, in Cairo, in April 1978, the grand imam Sheikh al-Azhar told the partners in dialogue representing the Vatican . . . that no dialogue would be possible as long as Christians did not respect the person of Muhammad . . . I said to one of the Muslims in the official delegation . . . that Muhammad was a religious figure, an exceptional politician, a brilliant man. But if Christians respected Muhammad as Muslims do, they would become Muslims. ‘How do you want us to respect him,’ I asked, ‘while remaining Christians?’ The sheikh replied that he personally was not a Hindu, but that he had a great respect for Gandhi and admired his person and actions. ²⁴

Affirming that Muhammad was a religious figure is rather minimalist, but Jomier is finally willing to admit that it is through Muhammad’s teaching ‘that many people have learned to pray and to worship God’. ²⁵ Therefore, rather than as a prophet, Muhammad is better described as a spiritual teacher and exemplar.

God has Used Muhammad as a Mercy for Humankind

Martin Forward, English Methodist theologian, has written an appreciation of Muhammad in which he declines to call him a prophet, but prefers to speak of him as a man of God. In his Muhammad: A Short Biography, he feels compelled to identify exactly what a Christian like himself who has thirty years of close relationships with Muslims should say about their Prophet. He begins by laying out that he will attempt as a non-Muslim

to write charitably and respectfully, especially about the heart of religion, which is where Muhammad is located for Muslims…Precisely because I am not a Muslim…the meaning and influence of this significant man of God emerges with compelling power for many more people than Muslims alone. ²⁶

The task for a Christian who admires Muhammad is to determine ‘how, if at all, God has used Muhammad as a mercy for humankind’. ²⁷ The answer has to refer to Muhammad’s attitude to Jews and Christians.

As far as Jews are concerned, Muhammad did not condemn every single one of them. His intention was to summon the Jews of his time and place back to ‘an obedience to God from which they had fallen short. Many Muslims, during the Prophet’s lifetime and since, have recognized this’. ²⁸ If it is possible to understand the Qur’an to equate ‘Islam’ with ‘submission’, then the rather stark rejection of any other religion apart from Islam in sura 3:85, ‘Whoever desires a religion apart from Islam, it will not be accepted, and he will be among the losers in the afterlife’, can be read as ‘Whoever desires a religion apart from submission to God, it will not be accepted’. In this case, ‘Christians, Jews and others could claim to submit to God, though in their own religious ummas, not in the umma of Islam. This possible translation has not been followed by many Muslims. Yet it may have force in it.’ ²⁹ However, Forward admits that by the end of Muhammad’s life, ‘God and the Prophet saw Islam as a distinct religion, self-consciously separate from Judaism and Christianity’. ³⁰ This was the end result of the tendency that emerged in Medina when Muslims began to see themselves as a separate community from the Jews and Christians. This was confirmed in 632 when Muhammad performed the pilgrimage to Mecca. He gave a speech from a white camel in which he proclaimed his last word of revelation found in sura 5:3, ‘This day I have perfected your religion for you, completed my favour towards you, and chosen for you Islam as your religion’.

Muhammad’s attitude to Christians is marked by the obvious fact that he had less contact with Christians in Medina than with Jews. They had no tribal groupings in the town to pose a threat to his leadership, and so ‘his primary disagreements with them were possibly more theoretical…in the realm of theology . . . As Muhammad saw it, the Christian concept of God struck at the heart of his prophetic vision of the monotheistic community’. ³¹ Forward asks whether Muhammad was right to interpret the Christian understanding of God as fundamentally antithetical to his own message. He does not answer the question, but implies that the strength of Muhammad’s opposition to Christian faith in Jesus was a principled rejection of the Jesus known in the gospels. He concludes that Christian and Muslim beliefs about Jesus are so different ‘that it is difficult to believe that he could ever be other than a divisive figure’. Jesus is seen in Christian scriptures as ‘a decisive and unifying figure for all creation’ but he is ‘of no importance to the centre of Muslim faith’. ³²

The outcome for Christians of Muhammad’s turning away from the historical Jesus is that they may honour and respect Muhammad but they cannot affirm what he has done to Jesus. He criticizes Cragg for claiming to honour Muhammad while ‘subverting his most cherished meanings’. ³³ Cragg wants Christians to translate Christian theology so it can speak to Muslims as profoundly as it can to Christians. To accomplish this, Cragg reads the Qur’an in such a way that challenges traditional Muslim interpretations of texts about Jesus, and claims that Muslims have failed to read their scriptures correctly.

But if Muslims were to do this, they would have to recognize the fallibility of their scripture. On this reading, the Quran would not only be a human document, but Muhammad would be a prophet who over-simplified the monotheistic vision and failed to do justice to the richness of the Christian doctrine of the atonement and Christianity’s Trinitarian vision. ³⁴

For this reason it is wrong for Cragg to continue to speak of Muhammad as a prophet, because he does not use the term in the same way as Muslims do. ‘The concept of prophecy is quite dissimilar in Islam and Christianity. Muslims and Christians deceive themselves when they think that, by calling Muhammad a prophet, they mean the same or even a comparable thing.’ ³⁵ Forward sees Muhammad in the light of the integrity and quality of lives demonstrated by many Muslim friends. He is convinced that God has used their convictions about Muhammad to empower and enlighten them. His final estimate of Muhammad is that he was a ‘man of God who has made God real for millions of people over many centuries’. ³⁶

Evaluation

Jomier’s reluctance to use the title ‘Prophet’ for Muhammad is linked to the same reticence found in the documents of the Second Vatican Council that were published in 1965. The Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions (Nostra Aetate), section 3 states that,

Upon the Moslems, too, the Church looks with esteem. They adore one God, living and enduring, merciful and all-powerful, Maker of heaven and earth and Speaker to men. They strive to submit wholeheartedly even to His inscrutable decrees, just as did Abraham, with whom the Islamic faith is pleased to associate itself. Though they do not acknowledge Jesus as God, they revere him as a prophet. ³⁷

There is no reference to Muhammad here, let alone to whether he is a prophet or not. This silence was noted by Muslims at the time, as Turkish Professor Mahmut Aydin points out. Their reaction was to ‘maintain that there is no possibility for dialogue unless the prophethood of Muhammad is considered by Christians’. ³⁸ Jomier could be understood to represent a mainstream Catholic position on Muhammad, which seeks to affirm that Muslims worship God but which at the same time sidelines the role of Muhammad in the origins of Islam. Other Catholic voices dissent from this approach as we shall see in subsequent sections.

Forward shares Jomier’s unease with the title ‘Prophet’ for Muhammad. This is because of his long acquaintance with Muslim friends. He says that he does not want to dishonour Muhammad by calling him a prophet while wanting to redefine the meaning of the title in such a way that would offend his friends. It is better not to use the title and spare the disagreeable relations with Muslims. His willingness to confess that Muhammad was a Godly man who led countless human beings to worship God would no doubt be acceptable to his Muslim friends as a positive assessment of the one who brought Islam to humanity, but only as a first step towards Forward admitting that Islam rather than Muhammad truly guides humans to God. That he cannot do this in its entirety is clear, and so Forward neither can affirm the ‘prophethood’ of Muhammad, nor the ‘truth’ of Islam. God has used Muslim convictions about Muhammad to draw them to himself, but this is in the context of God seeing Islam as a distinct religion from Judaism and Christianity. However, Forward is not a relativist, since he holds dearly to the truth of Jesus as ‘a unifying figure for all creation’ which is of ‘no importance’ to Islam.

The Prophet of Islam was Zealous for God

Chawkat Moucarry, raised as a Syrian Catholic but now a Protestant, uses the title given to Muhammad, ‘The Seal of the Prophets’ in Q33:40, to analyse his prophethood. Muhammad saw his mission as being in the footsteps of numerous prophets also named in the Bible so the Christian must compare his message with theirs. On the positive side, he preached the oneness of God in a polytheistic Arab context.

The Qur’an presents a coherent body of beliefs about God, creation, revelation, humankind, the general resurrection and the Day of judgment, to mention only the major themes . . . God’s attributes in Islam broadly correspond to what we find in the Bible.’ ³⁹

On the negative side, the Qur’an

fails to point to God as the Saviour, the God who achieved our salvation through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ . . . Because the Qur’an does not know God in this way, it fails to recognize the very nature of Jesus’ mission. ⁴⁰

Moucarry concludes that Muhammad’s mission falls short from a Christian perspective, and Christians have no alternative ‘but to challenge his credentials as a prophet’. ⁴¹ He refers to Christians who have accepted that Muhammad was a prophet, but a prophet sent only to the Arabs. He rejects this concession because ‘the Qur’an includes accepting that Muhammad was sent to all peoples’. ⁴² While the Prophet of Islam is not a prophet in the Biblical way, ‘he was probably the most zealous Arab for God in his generation’. ⁴³ His knowledge of the gospel was partial, but he did not mislead his people for personal gain. He believed that God had called him to be a prophet and that the Qur’an was given to him by God, so his prophethood must be restricted to that frame of reference, as the Prophet of Islam.

Christians can Show Respect for Muslims by Calling Muhammad ‘The Prophet of Islam’

John Azumah, a Ghanaian Presbyterian theologian who was raised in a Muslim family, commends to Christians the use of the title ‘Prophet of Islam’ when speaking of Muhammad. He raises the question, Is Muhammad a Prophet of God? ⁴⁴ He admits that he cannot simply give an affirmative answer. He must maintain a discreet distance from his Muslim counterpart who enthusiastically endorses the prophethood of Muhammad. In such a conversation a Christian should not be too ready to undermine his own conception of prophecy in order to be friendly to his Muslim neighbour.

He comes back to this argument in a recent article in which he responds to a Muslim like Mahmut Aydin who argues that ‘it is very difficult for a sensible Christian not to use the title “Prophet” for Muhammad’. ⁴⁵ But Christians have a difficulty with Aydin’s assured tone because ‘it is naïve if not hypocritical to think one can see Muhammad ‘as Muslims see him’ and remain non-Muslim. To see Muhammad as Muslims see him requires responding favourably to his message and so, inevitably converting to Islam’. ⁴⁶ Azumah repeats here what he said in 2008, ‘For Muslims to demand that Christians acknowledge Muhammad as a prophet is like Christians demanding that Muslims accept Jesus as the Son of God and God Incarnate. These demands are asking partners in dialogue to commit confessional suicide!’ This is why Christians ‘can only refer to and respect Muhammad as the “Prophet of Islam”’ ⁴⁷

Evaluation

Moucarry’s appeal to Christians to refer to Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam shows a willingness to adopt the Muslim title of prophet in the context of Christian reserve about the nature of that prophethood. He tries to maintain a balance between affirmation and rejection, by openly accepting that the teaching in the Qur’an about God is often comparable to that of the Bible. His list of features common to Qur’an and Bible is akin to that drawn up by Cragg. Like Cragg too, Moucarry wants to show respect for the theology of Muhammad in terms of his ability to persuade his fellow Arabs to turn from polytheism to the worship of the one true God. However, unlike Cragg, he does not feel comfortable promoting the long-established Christian theory that Muhammad brought the revelation of God to the Arabs since they lacked scripture that testified to His reality. Confining Muhammad’s mission to his ethnic group is shortsighted, according to Moucarry, since Muhammad himself was fully aware of the universality of his message. Moucarry has in mind the kind of argument found in Paul of Antioch’s Letter to a Muslim Friend from the 13th century, repeated in a Letter from the People of Cyprus to the Imam of Damascus al-Dimashqi in 1321, in which these Christian writers acknowledge that Muhammad had been sent to the pagan Arabs,

about whom it says that no messenger or warner had come to them before him, and that it was not obliging us to follow him because messengers had come to us before, addressing us in our own tongues and warning us about our religion, to which we adhere today. ⁴⁸

Moucarry is all too aware that Muslims do not appreciate this shrinking of the significance of their Prophet.

Azumah is concerned that well-meaning Christians may wish to affirm too much about Muhammad in the interests of friendship with Muslims. He echoes the sentiments of Forward here, and reflects his own Ghanaian upbringing where Christian and Muslim family members get along well without having to confess the faith of the other. But he is prepared to use the concept of prophethood with different meanings. Whereas Forward feels that it is best to avoid calling Muhammad a prophet in order to maintain a proper Christian respect for Muslim friends, Azumah can testify to the value of Christians referring to Muhammad as the Prophet of Islam in the ongoing life of a mixed faith family. This more dialectical approach to prophethood mirrors Cragg’s belief that the Prophet of the Qur’an brings revelation from God, which needs to be supplemented by the revelation of Jesus Christ in order to be complete. This twofold form of revelation is the theme of the next section.

The Qur’an Is Influenced by Both General and Special Revelation

Chawkat Moucarry positively affirms that God has revealed Himself through the Qur’an in terms of general revelation or common grace. These traditional Christian theological concepts are normally applied to the knowledge of God found in creation, and Moucarry can see this kind of revelation in the teaching of the Qur’an about the attributes of God. He also finds special revelation in the message of Islam in those aspects of the Biblical tradition found there. ‘The Qur’an is influenced by both general and special revelation, which means that Islam is neither a biblical religion nor a religion entirely independent of the biblical tradition.’ ⁴⁹ The fact that Islamic monotheism coheres with the message of the Bible concerning the oneness of God means that ‘God-fearing Muslims worship the true God even if they do not know him in the fullness of his revelation in Jesus Christ’. ⁵⁰ But this does not diminish the fullness of revelation in the gospel. Moucarry is not saying that

God-fearing and pious Muslims have enough of God’s revelation. On the contrary, they still need to hear of Jesus Christ as much as anyone else; they still need to respond to the gospel and put their trust in Jesus as their Lord and Saviour. ⁵¹

The Qur’an Affirms that the Christian God is the True God

Fouad Elias Accad (d. 1994) was raised in the Lebanese Greek Orthodox Church. He became an ordained Protestant pastor who witnessed to Muslims by using passages from the Qur’an and the Bible as demonstrated in his Seven Muslim-Christian Principles. He used Qur’anic and Biblical texts together because he believed that

Muhammad did not in any way intend for the Qur’an to be anti-Christ or an anti-Christian document . . . Because of the largely pro-Christian attitude in the Qur’an, it seems just as legitimate to use it in our witnessing as to use a pro-Christian quote from any other respected book or leader. ⁵²

In contrast to Moucarry, he believes that Muhammad was a bringer of revelation to the unscriptured Arabs who did not, like the Jews and Christians living in Arabia, have the word of God in Arabic.

It seems that Muhammad saw himself as a ‘warner’ who was bringing the Qur’an in a clear Arabic tongue in order to fill this literary vacuum within the Arab religious culture and to help turn the Arabs from idolatry to worship of the one true God (S46:11–12). ⁵³

Accad tells a story of a Christian professor in a Middle Eastern university who was reading his Bible in his office when one of his students visited him. The student asked, ‘Do you believe Muhammad was a prophet?’ If the professor had said no, the student would have immediately lost respect for him, because in his eyes only heretics believed that Muhammad was not a prophet. The professor, knowing that the student was a sceptic, looked out of his window at the people a few floors below, walking through town, and replied,

If you mean, ‘Do I believe that Muhammad is a prophet like those people down there believe it?’ then my answer is no. But if you mean, ‘Do I believe that he was a prophet like the Qur’an says he was?’ then my answer is yes.

The student was shocked, and said, ‘What does the Qur’an say?’ The professor answered, ‘It says he was a warner in a clear Arabic tongue’ (S26:194–195). The student stood amazed and said, ‘I’ve never met anyone like you’. ⁵⁴

Accad is convinced that Muhammad was in tune with orthodox Christian beliefs rather than being opposed to them.

When he confronted Christians about having three gods, he was not attacking the idea of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in the Godhead. He was attacking the idea of God having a wife and then having a son by her (S5:116, and 72:3). Otherwise it is impossible to explain what the Qur’an says in S29:46, ‘Do not dispute with the People of the Book; say “We believe in what has been sent down to us, and what has been sent down to you; Our God and your God is One”’. . . Since Muhammad knew the Christians’ belief concerning a Trinitarian God, this verse would make no sense if Muhammad were attacking the Trinity. ⁵⁵

Evaluation

These two Middle Eastern Christians have similarities and differences in their approach to the revelation that Muhammad brought. Moucarry is generous in his praise of the way that the message of the Qur’an proclaims the truth about the one creator desiring exclusive worship from humanity, but he holds that the Qur’an does not contain the complete revelation found in the gospel of Jesus Christ. Accad reads the Qur’an in quite a different way. There is no attack on the orthodox Trinitarian formula of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, but rather a rejection of an unorthodox trinity of God, Jesus and Mary. Indeed the Qur’an recognizes that Christians believe in the oneness of God and thus upholds orthodox as opposed to heterodox theology.

Accad likes the traditional Christian theory that Muhammad came to the Arabs in the providence of God to give them what other nations had received through the Bible being translated into their languages. He approves of the Christian professor appealing to Muhammad as God’s ‘warner’ to the Arabs by way of answering whether he believed that Muhammad was a prophet. There should be no problem for a Christian affirming that Muhammad acted as God’s messenger to his own people. Of course, Moucarry is concerned that this containment of Muhammad as a local prophet in the Arabian Peninsula does not do justice to the total message of the Qur’an. There he is indeed a warner to the Arabs but he is also and perhaps more importantly a warner to all humanity.

God Sent Muhammad to the Arabs to Improve their Life

William Montgomery Watt (d. 2006), Scottish Anglican Islamologist, is well known for his argument that the attack on the Trinity in the Qur’an is not against an orthodox Christian formulation, but rather against a heterodox community. ‘The idea that Mary was one of the Trinity may have come from an obscure sect of Collyridians, heard of in Arabia more than two centuries before Muhammad.’ ⁵⁶ Nevertheless, he acknowledges that the Qur’an does undermine important Christian beliefs, such as the incarnation and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Faced with this uneasy opposition between the message of Muhammad and the Christian gospel, what should a Christian think?

It is clear that for a modern person the Qur’ānic perception of Christianity is seriously inadequate and at some points erroneous. It is important, however, that the Christian of today should not take this as a reason for denying that Muhammad was inspired by God. What is necessary, rather, is a reconsideration of the nature of prophethood. ⁵⁷

Watt appeals to ‘leading Christian theologians today’ who hold that ‘a prophet is a person who brings messages from God to the people of his own time and place’. ⁵⁸ According to the Qur’an, Muhammad brought his message in Arabic because ‘prophets bring revelations in the language of their own people’. ⁵⁹ Therefore there is a convergence of opinion between modern Christian understanding of prophecy and the way the Qur’an describes Muhammad’s prophetic work. So how does this relate to Muhammad’s poor grasp of orthodox Christian faith?

Since we know virtually nothing about the precise views of the Christians living in Mecca or visiting it, we should allow that the Qur’ānic perception of their beliefs may have been largely true. It would also appear that it was sufficiently true to be an adequate guide for Muhammad in his dealings with the Christians of Mecca and with Christian groups elsewhere in Arabia whom he encountered in the last two years of his life. ⁶⁰

In other words, the heterodox Christianity in Arabia that Muhammad encountered explains his divergence from mainstream Christian teaching. He cannot be held responsible for not knowing the latter if he never encountered orthodox Christians in his lifetime.

Watt is too good a student of Islam to postpone any further a reckoning with Muslim interpretations of the prophethood of Muhammad. He candidly admits that although Christians may allow Muhammad a prophetic role for the Arabs of his time, Muslims will not accept that his message should be restricted to seventh-century Arabia.

While for the Christian the prophet has a message from God for his own time and place, the Muslim tradition is that prophets receive the actual words of God without the admixture of anything human apart from the language, and that many of the revealed messages are of universal validity. It cannot be maintained that everything in the Qur’ān is universal. ⁶¹

So there is no avoiding a clash of interpretation of the universal validity of the message brought by Muhammad. ‘On the standard Islamic view that the Qur’ān is entirely from God, and that the personality of Muhammad has contributed nothing, it is difficult to explain the inadequate and erroneous statements about Biblical matters’. ⁶²

Despite this critique of the value of the total message of the Qur’an, Watt wants to reserve a significant role for the prophetic worth of Muhammad in history.

There was a religious vacuum in Mecca which Christians could not fill. The subsequent acceptance of Islam by many in North Africa, the Fertile Crescent and Iran shows that there was something of a religious vacuum in these regions also. There are thus grounds for holding that God was behind the appearance of Islam in order to bring something better to the people involved. In other words, Islam came into being, not through human planning but by a divine initiative. ⁶³

The final advice Watt gives to Christians is to see Muhammad as ‘a religious leader through whom God has worked, and that is tantamount to holding that he is in some sense a prophet. Such a view does not contradict any central Christian belief’. ⁶⁴

Muhammad is the Prophet who Reinvigorated a More Jewish-Christian Perspective on Jesus

Hans Küng, German Catholic theologian known for his active dialogue with Muslims, though not as a representative of the Vatican, has championed the view that Muhammad re-introduced to the wider world the type of faith in Jesus found in Jewish Christian tradition largely lost in the development of the church in the Middle East. Küng thinks that Muhammad had no real contact with Christians who believed in the divinity of Jesus. ‘He did not derive his knowledge of Jesus from the “Monophysites” in nearby Egypt and Syria, nor the Chalcedonians, since according to them Jesus was not a human person – which for Muhammad would have been completely unacceptable.’ ⁶⁵ Muhammad was far more likely to have met Christians in Arabia who were inheritors of a form of Jewish Christianity in which Jesus was a man chosen by God to be Messiah.

In the original Jewish Christian community, belief in one God was so much taken for granted that the notion of rivalry through another being equal to God could not arise . . . Whatever may be said about Muhammad’s historical knowledge, there are unmistakable parallels between the Qur’an and the understanding of Christ in Jewish-Christian communities . . . According to Justin, Jewish Christians accepted Jesus as Messiah/Christ but claimed that he was ‘a man of men’ and had been ‘chosen’ to be the Messiah/Christ, later labeled ‘heretical’ because it was allegedly ‘natural’ or ‘adoptionist.’ ⁶⁶

This would explain why the Qur’an is so firmly opposed to those who give Jesus a divine status. However, such a rejection of the divinity of Jesus can hardly enable loyal Catholics to embrace the Jesus of the Qur’an. What should the Church do? The answer lies in accepting that Muhammad’s alternative view of Jesus is valid within the spectrum of views found in the New Testament documents. The Church must be open to going back behind the developed creedal confessions to the early formative period of Christianity and affirm the variety of approaches to the status of Jesus in the Apostolic period. Then it would be possible for the Church to welcome Muhammad as a prophet of God who came to remind the rest of God’s people that Jesus was authentically human.

From the perspective of the New Testament we must not make dogmatic objections to Muhammad’s understanding of himself as an authentic prophet after Jesus . . . Wouldn’t this recognition of the title Prophet for Muhammad have major positive consequences for an understanding between Christians and Muslims. ⁶⁷

While the Church should accommodate Muhammad as a prophet, this should not mean making him out to be a perfect man. Muslims need to be challenged to admit this reality. ‘However rightly Muhammad’s virtues may be emphasized, critical questions about his morality cannot simply be suppressed. They relate to the truthfulness of the Prophet, his use of force and his relationship to women.’ ⁶⁸ Muhammad conceded that self-deception was possible in the case of the Satan verses. He broke treaties with both the Jews in Medina and the Meccans, and ‘did not shrink from political murder’. ⁶⁹ He married Zaynab, the wife of his adopted son, Zayd, and this is justified by the Qur’an. ‘The remark made by Muhammad’s favourite wife ‘A’ishah in this connection can hardly have been invented: “God is anxious to do your will”.’ ⁷⁰

Evaluation

Montgomery Watt’s view that Muhammad had no proper awareness of mainstream Christianity but encountered extreme sectarian Collyridians is hard to align with the biography of Ibn Ishaq as we have already seen in section 1.4. In addition to his exposure to the beliefs of Waraqa and Jabr in Mecca, Muhammad’s willingness to send his persecuted disciples from Mecca to a safe haven in Ethiopia implies that he was reasonably familiar with Ethiopian Christianity. These pieces of information also cast doubt on Hans Küng’s suggestion that Muhammad was in contact with some remnants of Jewish Christianity in Arabia, and that he was reproducing their Christology in his message. It makes better sense of Ibn Ishaq’s portrait to think of Muhammad attacking the Christology of the Ethiopians who he knew quite well. If Muhammad had become aware that God is one and that idolatry was a perverse corruption of true worship then it is only a logical extension of this realization to regard Ethiopian Christians as betrayers of the God they claimed to honour through their exaggerated devotion to the prophet Jesus. This proposal is supported by Ibn Ishaq’s description of the deputation of 20 Christians from Najran or Ethiopia at the end of Muhammad’s life once he had conquered Mecca. When these men heard Muhammad recite the Qur’an to them ‘their eyes flowed with tears, and they accepted God’s call, believed in him, and declared the truth. They recognized in him the things that had been said of him in their scriptures’. ⁷¹ Now Ibn Ishaq may not be telling the truth about Muhammad’s contacts with Christians, but if we give him the benefit of the doubt then we can conclude that Muhammad had an awareness of their belief in the divinity of Jesus.

Hans Küng’s suggestion that the human Jesus of the Qur’an reflects aspects of New Testament teaching is only partly true. He has been keen to support the long-standing approach of Western scholars who argue that Jesus thought of himself as only a human being and did not seek to be worshipped as divine. He holds that Muhammad was only drawing attention to this truth lost in the development of Johannine Christology and the subsequent creeds. However, the partiality of this Jesus of history versus the Christ of faith tradition is well known. After all, the very gospels that seem to support a subordinated Jesus are written by men who believe in the divine Christ.

Both Jesus and Muhammad were Theocentric; they Thought of Themselves as Subordinate to God

American Presbyterian theologian William E. Phipps (d. 2010) wrote a comparative study of Jesus and Muhammad in which he regards their teaching as complementary but not identical. One of the difficulties for both Christians and Muslims is the way they both regard the originators of their religious traditions as perfect men. ‘The early Church thought of Jesus as sinless, but is there a basis for thinking that he considered himself perfect? “Why do you call me good?” Jesus asked; “No one is good except God alone”.’ If Jesus believed he had no imperfections, could he have honestly said those words? ⁷² Phipps is not so skilled with the Islamic tradition and rather too easily reaches the conclusion that Muhammad was less than perfect, a notion that confessing Muslims may find hard to make. His basic assumption is that ‘both Jesus and Muhammad wanted people to distinguish between the imperfect messenger and the sublime message’. ⁷³

An illustration of the imperfect prophetic ministry of Muhammad is the case of the Satanic verses. Muhammad is said to have proclaimed that Allat, Aluzza, and Almanat were angelic beings who could intercede with God. ‘Muhammad soon realized that he had mistaken God’s message and substituted another revelation, which superseded the earlier one. So God abrogated what Satan interposed.’ ⁷⁴ Phipps does not engage with those Muslims who reject the authenticity of this traditional account in order precisely to preserve Muhammad from failure to discern the voice of Gabriel. He is not sure whether Muhammad was similar to Jesus in promoting gender equality. While the Qur’an is ambiguous about gender equality, ‘Early Muslim tradition generally represents Muhammad as expressing the usual patriarchal sentiments. For example, in one of his sermons, he said: “Women are the snares of the devil . . . Put women in an inferior position since God has done so”.’ ⁷⁵

Jesus is not completely clear of criticism in this area either. Phipps thinks that Jesus rejected the denigration of women in his own Jewish culture, but struggles with the role of women in gentile societies.

Mark’s gospel tells of a Greek woman living in Phoenicia who provided a consciousness-raising experience for Jesus. His initial response to her plea for help for her deranged daughter displayed both ethnic and gender prejudice. He gave her the silent treatment because Jewish men shunned talking with women in public . . . Jesus insulted the woman by telling her that it would not be proper for him to throw to gentile ‘dogs’ what belongs to Jewish ‘children’. When she responded to Jesus’ contemptuous remark in a gracious but determined manner, he came to realize her depth of faith. He then provided therapy for the girl, after recognizing that females in a foreign land are as worthy of his concern as males in Israel. ⁷⁶

In the light of such human weakness displayed by Jesus, the exalted Christ of the early church needs to be regarded in a critical fashion. Christians simply must go back to the human Jesus of the synoptic accounts and then they will be able to recognize his proper place in the scheme of God’s economy. Only if they are prepared to do this will they be able to recognize the place of Muhammad in the revelation of God in history. ‘Despite the Christocentricity of some early Christians, Jesus thought of the rule of God as central . . . Both Jesus and Muhammad were theocentric; they thought of themselves as subordinate to God’. ⁷⁷ Still, Phipps is a Christian theologian who ultimately values the teaching of Jesus as more theologically reliable than that of Muhammad. ‘I evaluate Jesus as having more of God’s truth than Moses and Muhammad do.’ ⁷⁸ This is because Jesus performed the will of God more perfectly than Muhammad. ‘In real life, both Muslims and Christians highly respected a prophet who once offered this test: “Anyone who resolves to do the will of God will know whether the teaching is from God”’. ⁷⁹

Christianity and Islam are Equally Modes of God’s Revelation of Himself

German Lutheran Martin Bauschke sees Christianity and Islam as equally valid modes of revelation. It was the will of God to use Jesus and Muhammad to reveal himself to humanity. ‘Dialogue between Christians and Muslims is sustainable only if it is acknowledged that God wanted both religions as authentic ways to salvation. God revealed himself to both, Jesus and Muhammad!’ ⁸⁰ It follows that the Bible and the Qur’an are also equally the word of God.

If Christianity and Islam are equal ways to God, then Jesus and Muhammad shall become the two younger brothers of Moses, and the Bible and the Qur’ān shall become the second and third testaments of God, added to the first testament, the Torah. ⁸¹

Bauschke does not hesitate to call Muhammad God’s Prophet. This is the logical conclusion to his belief that the Qur’an is from God.

I belong to those Christian theologians who go beyond the mere phenomenological description of Muhammad as a ‘prophet’, and who also call for a theological recognition of Muhammad as God’s Prophet . . . When we speak about the prophethood of Muhammad, we are ultimately speaking about the Qur’ān as an authentic Word of God. ⁸²

He regards the incarnation and Qur’an as different but complementary modes of revelation. He understands

the mission of Jesus and of Muhammad, the revelation of the Word of God as incarnation and as inlibration as being complementary – such as light in physics, which behaves both as a wave and as a particle. Jesus and Muhammad are not doubles, but brothers with similarities and differences. ⁸³

He takes the complementarity of Jesus’ powerless death and Muhammad’s powerful rule as indicative of God’s use of two modes of revelation.

To follow God’s will in life is not only a question of individual spirituality but also a social, political and legal challenge for establishing societies with a just order. God does not only call believers out of the world (ecclesia), but rather places them as a viceroy (khalifa) into the world. The wandering preacher from Nazareth is complemented by the mediator, politician and commander from Mecca. Jesus, the suffering and murdered righteous in Jerusalem, is complemented by Muhammad, the suffering righteous in Mecca and in the end the victorious prophet in Medina. From our human point of view the merciful God sometimes seems to be powerless (the cross of Golgotha) and sometimes to be powerful (the purification of the Temple and the destruction of the idols in the Ka’ba) when we look at what his/her messengers are doing or suffering. ⁸⁴

Evaluation

Phipps is a little different from other critics of Muhammad in introducing similar criticisms of Jesus. There is an attempt to be even-handed in drawing attention to Jesus’ apparently negative attitude to a non-Jewish woman, but Phipps still feels more affirming of Jesus than Muhammad in relation to gender equality. Of course, it can be argued that Jesus was testing the faith of this woman and that his seeming coldness towards her fitted with his calling to seek the lost sheep of Israel. Muhammad’s reported dismissal of women in general makes Phipps uneasy about this parallel that he has drawn. So it is not surprising that he actually prefers the attitudes of Jesus over those of Muhammad, despite trying to be fair to both.

Bauschke is the most openly embracing of Islam as a complete revelation from God, willed by him just as much as Christianity is willed by him. He represents the fullest ‘theocentric’ view of religions of any of the writers surveyed here. However, he does not begin to analyse the differences between Islam and Christianity in any meaningful way. Jesus’ death is understood as a form of martyrdom like Muhammad’s rejection in Mecca. Clearly, Bauschke has little feeling of thanksgiving for redemption through the blood of the cross, which would make him favour Jesus as saviour. He praises Muhammad for the destruction of idols in Mecca, but does not enter into any critique of his exiling and then elimination of Jews in Medina. They were hardly guilty of practicing idolatry, but were rather unwilling to accept Muhammad’s rule of their community. Bauschke commends Muhammad for establishing a society with a just order but fails to justify his conclusion with appropriate evidence. In trying to treat Muslims with fairness, he does not approach historical data with the kind of detached scholarship that Cragg or Watt exemplify.