Jesus and Muhammad: new convergences

Tim Winter
University of Cambridge
United Kingdom

you can read the original publication in PDF format here:

Apparently 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-z ur is one of themubiqat , 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 Bijlefeld 2 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 world’s 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 one’s own absolute covenant with God. For Christians and 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 Muslim-Christian relations. This is the polarity which Muslims would refer to as lu†f and qahr — God’s 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 Blake’s 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

The remainder of the article can be viewed via the pdf link above…