Islam's Jesus

Introduction

Introduction After September 11, 2001, the world, particularly the Western world, witnessed a tremendous rise in interest in Islamic studies, including works about what Muslims believe and practice. This book explores one of the most important themes of Islamic theology: Jesus and his role in this tradition. Not many people in the West comprehend how Jesus is understood by Muslims generally, nor do they understand the role of Jesus in the Qur’an. After one of my lectures to an audience of about seventy people, I discovered that only one person in the audience knew that a chapter of the Qur’an was named after Mary, the mother of Jesus. A similar experience occurred when I presented a lecture about Jesus in Islam to a different audience. I found that only about 10 percent of the audience knew that Jesus was a prominent messenger of God in Islam, and only 2 percent knew that Muslims believe in Jesus’s eschatological descent, or the return of Jesus. The media coverage of Reza Aslan’s book Zealot, which equates Aslan’s Jesus with Islam’s Jesus, drives home this point further. The book is about the historical Jesus and has nothing at all to do with the Islam’s Jesus, who, as I hope to show in this book is, in reality, not at all dissimilar from Christianity’s Jesus. Even among Muslims, it is not well known that there are diverse interpretations of references to Jesus in the Qur’an and the Hadith, a fact that can provide inspiration for pluralism. The present work aims to illuminate Islam’s rich theological engagement with the figure of Jesus; work of this nature can lay the groundwork for Muslim-Christian dialogue. The focus of this book involves many questions for both Muslims and Christians. How does the Qur’an speak of Jesus? What is the place of Jesus in Islamic theology? What do Muslims believe about the coming of Jesus at the end of time? Can beliefs about Jesus provide common ground for Muslims and Christians? What is the Islamic approach to dialogue between Christians and Muslims? It is important to note that as a scholar, I am trained in classical Islamic theology , which is composed of three major themes: divinity, prophethood, and eschatology. My training, more specifically, is in eschatology. Eschatology is the study of things related to the end times and the afterlife. Among Muslim theologians , there is no doubt that Jesus is an important figure in Islamic eschatology. Almost all manuals of Islamic theology contain a statement that includes the words “and we believe in the descent of Jesus.” For me, this is both interesting and challenging. How an individual could descend from heaven to earth is a perplexing theological problem. This book is a result of my attempts to find an answer to this question. My response is from a Turkish Muslim scholar’s perspective , one that has also been enriched by contemporary Muslim theologians and by my experience working at American Catholic institutions, more specifically teaching courses on Islam and general religious studies courses at a Jesuit university, and by my significant engagement in interfaith dialogue. Belief in Jesus is one of the major principles of faith in Islam, as he is considered one of the five elite prophets; the others are Abraham, Moses, Noah, and Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon them all. They are called the ul al-‘azm prophets, meaning the possessors of steadfastness. Jesus is a messenger of God like his brother Muhammad, peace and blessings be upon him.1 He is so important in Islam that the highest Muslim in rank after Muhammad still cannot reach the spiritual level of Jesus. Jesus is the messenger of God, but in contrast to the traditional Christian teachings, he is not believed to be a part of God or an incarnation of God. This is also true for all other prophets of God. In the afterlife, Jesus is allowed to intercede and ask God to forgive sinners, but he cannot forgive sinners by himself. This is also true for the Prophet of Islam. It is God who forgives the sins of human beings. In Islamic theology, the limited power of prophets does not negate the fact that Jesus was among the highest of prophets in the chain of prophethood. Islam gives remarkable spiritual rank to the messengers of God but never allows a monument or statue to be erected in their honor. This is mainly a...