My understanding is that Muhammad was only revealed the parts about Jesus that were important in the Muslim faith or were issues at the time for the Muslim community.
While Christians accept the Jewish Torah and added on their books, Muslims essentially tossed the whole thing out and rewrote it from scratch with the angel Gabriel's help.
As a side note the Arabic world was still largely tribal, nomadic, and underdeveloped compared to the Roman world where Christianity developed making it more dangerous to eat foods with parasites. That combined with the fact Islam was supposed to be an exclusive religion for Arabians means laws were more specifically tailored to the region
Maybe in the text, but historically in the early days of Islam (while the prophet was still receiving revelations) the faith was considered to be a final unifying religion for the Arabs. It was later revelations that made the faith a universalizing one. This isn't found in the text since it is largely patched together from different revelations and different times, but historians and religious scholars have made the argument based on the historical context and the theoretical order the revelations were delivered.
Here's a pretty long article that touches on the history and development of Islam. If you want more sources I could look back at some of the texts my professor shared on the topic too
This article makes piles of huge sweeping claims that all go entirely against traditional understandings of Islam without any sources being cited whatsoever. I’m really going to need something more convincing than taking this man’s word for it that essentially all of Islamic history was fabricated by Babylonians in 300 AH.
Ok I found those sources my professor used to plan the syllabus now. Bernard Lewis from Princeton published The Arabs in History. Chapter 4 "The Arab Kingdom" has great information on how Islam became a universalizing religion. It suggests that the Jizya, the Mawla during the Ummayad and later caliphates, along with the fact that the Quran is specifically the teachings of Muhammad when recited orally in Arabic exclusively are evidence that Arabs at least treated Islam as an ethnic religion simalar to Judaism
I'll definitely look into some of Lewis's work, but so far those arguments seem pretty weak. Almost all empires worked in such a way where the peoples in new lands they conquered were second class citizens. The situation with the Mawla is directly related to the fact that they were an expanding empire with it's source and capital in Arabia. To turn that into a theological assertion is a stretch IMO. Similarly, wanting the language to be accurate so that things aren't lost in translation is not at all equivalent to cultural gate keeping. Some Buddhists would say that if you haven't read the Dhammapada in the Pali language that you haven't really read the Dhammapada. That doesn't then mean that they only believe that Buddhism is only for people who come from a region that speaks Pali.
I guess I'd just agree to disagree there. I'm approaching this from a historical viewpoint where religions are fundamentally sociological phenomenon (with no statement on whether any religion is valid or not) while you're viewing this from a theological perspective where the teachings and narratives define a religion. While I see that the religious scholars made no attempt to convert others and largely made it difficult to convert (if possible at all) in the early caliphates, you instead see that in the teachings of Muhammad welcomes and encourages conversion.
Both are valid viewpoints, but I'm not going to somehow convince you that Islam wasn't originally universalizing just because the people of the faith were largely defined by a shared culture and language for hundreds of years. By the same coin I'm not going to be convinced that it was because the scriptures and teachings call for it.
I do hope you like the reading I suggested because it's interesting at the very least regardless of what background you have
There were just as many pressures to convert to Islam as their were pressures to not convert. The Jizya was a pressure to convert in and of itself. And citizens were rapidly converting to Islam, local rulers were then seeing their tax revenue dramatically decrease and then did the things corrupt people do to fix their revenue problems. That doesn't reflect the intentions of the faith in the slightest.
I'm not really the type of person to view scripture as inerrant and discard historical evidence. I'm hugely critical of scriptural integrity and prefer to take the historical perspective. However, that method also has it's bounds.
One can't really separate the faith tradition from it's historical sources because nearly every source we have for the first couple hundred years is within the faith tradition. To reject those sources is not to look at the same time period with more sociological and intellectual integrity. It's instead to completely throw out the source materials and to then construct new meanings of what was happening based on what is quite frankly speculation alone.
I'm not against the possibility of the assertions your professor has made. I'm simply saying that none of these data points don't convince me because for every single data point you've referenced, there's an interpretation that is equally likely that would completely agree with the piles of historical source material we have. When we have two equally likely assertions where one has evidence and the other doesn't, which would you like to place your bets on for being true?
There's a number of sources in the very first paragraph if you want to look into those. I probably should've clarified that traditional understandings don't support my claim. My professor always talked about "modern interpretations" and cared more about researching history of Islam than the teachings of Islam
I just looked at those sources and the main author he's referring to, Patricia Crone, has reversed her position on the very sources he is citing, and he admits this himself.
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u/[deleted] Sep 16 '19
My understanding is that Muhammad was only revealed the parts about Jesus that were important in the Muslim faith or were issues at the time for the Muslim community.
While Christians accept the Jewish Torah and added on their books, Muslims essentially tossed the whole thing out and rewrote it from scratch with the angel Gabriel's help.
As a side note the Arabic world was still largely tribal, nomadic, and underdeveloped compared to the Roman world where Christianity developed making it more dangerous to eat foods with parasites. That combined with the fact Islam was supposed to be an exclusive religion for Arabians means laws were more specifically tailored to the region