Islam

We don't really have a catch-all Islam thread (whether good or bad I'll leave that for others to decide), so here we go.

I've been wondering why Islam is, from a historical perspective, an Abrahamic religion. During Muhammad's lifetime the regional religious makeup included both polytheistic and monoetheistic religions as well as Judaism and Christianity, so why did Islam ultimately tap into the traditions of the latter two instead of another tradition?

my guess would be that the model of a "universal" monotheistic religion (ie one like Xtianity that is not strictly tribally based and is built on "converts") was more attractive for political and philosophical reasons

but I have no idea really

I think it was because Muhammad believed there was onuy one God

as noted in the original post, there were other active monotheistic religions in the region at the time

It is because the Arab people were traditionally believed to be descendants of Ishmael, the son of Abraham and his concubine, Hagar. There is a passage in Genesis where Ishmael and Isaac,Abraham's other son (with his wife Sara) part company, going in different directions to occupy different lands, an allegorical origin story of the Hebrew and Arab peoples.
When the Koran came to be written it included versions of stories found in both Old and New Testaments, with Abraham, Moses and Jesus all featuring and being regarded as Islamic prophets.

I don't think anyone can answer that, since apart from the Quran there are no writings from Muhammed, and the answer in the Quran is self-explanatory (it's because there is no God but Allah).

But also it's kinda the wrong question. As pointed out a few times, there were also other religions in the area. It's not like the whole of Arabia chose to become monotheistic from one day to the next, it was a battle, and for some reason the people who believed in monotheism won out. I can only guess, but it might have been exactly because of the tradition of polytheism, that a new religion had to be strictly monotheistic, otherwise what was the point?

well yeah - my point was that a non-tribally based monotheism allows you to gain converts (and a political base of power) that cuts across traditional lines of allegiance.

Did the Ishmael story have much purchase in the religions outside of Judaism and Christianity? xp

to Frederik: I guess my question put another way is if there was something about the Judeo-Christian origin story that made it a more attractive candidate to base this new religion on? Did all/most/many Arab religions put a lot of faith (pardon the pun) in the Abraham/Ishmael story? Did the YHWH religions have much influence in the region at the time?

In other words, I'm not asking why Islam was monotheistic or polytheistic, I'm asking why it was built on Judeo-Christian traditions when other traditions were available.

there were jews and christians in pre-islamic arabia though arab polytheism was the dominant religious form

Muhammad was trying to start a movement that would unify the disparate Arab tribes and provide them with a sense of a shared mission/destiny. It seems like the Old Testament was a natural source of inspiration for that kind of endeavor.

We don't really know that much about pre-islamic Arabia, not a lot was written down. Even a town like Mecca is not really mentioned anywhere in ancient sources. I read Tom Hollands 'In the Shadow of the Sword' earlier this year, who goes as far as claiming that Muhammad was born somewhere else completely, and that references in the Quran just got conflated on to an insignificant place after the fact. I'm not convinced, but it perhaps shows a bit about how little is really certain.

there's a Surah (Surah 53) where Mohammed is referring to an opponent in Mecca and uses a rhetorical question that presupposes that people in Mecca would be familiar with "the Scrolls (scriptures) of Moses":

33. Have you considered him who turned away?

34. And gave a little, and held back?

35. Does he possess knowledge of the unseen, and can therefore foresee?

36. Or was he not informed of what is in the Scrolls of Moses?

37. And of Abraham, who fulfilled?

38. That no soul bears the burdens of another soul.

39. And that the human being attains only what he strives for.

40. And that his efforts will be witnessed.

41. Then he will be rewarded for it the fullest reward.

so Mohammed is presumably building upon known - though as best as we can tell broadly not accepted - religious doctrine

Well, the whole surah can be read here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Holy_Qur%27an_(Maulana_Muhammad_Ali)/53._The_Star but I can't see where Mecca is mentioned?

xp

why Islam is, from a historical perspective, an Abrahamic religion.

Prior to founding Islam, Mohammed was exposed to Judaism and to a lesser extent Christianity via local minority populations of jews and christians. Both Mecca and Medina were centers of trade.

If one rejects the idea that Allah chose Mohammed as his ultimate prophet and inspired him with the knowledge that Islam was the final step up to perfection along a line that included lesser revelations in Judaism and Christianity (which is the official Islamic belief), then it just makes good sense to think that he was highly impressed with those religions and like most new religions, he chose to build his newer structure on top of other older, accepted and venerated religions, as a method of borrowing an instant authority and a ready-made ancient tradition. In this case, he blended Abrahamic monotheism with some existing local religion(s) and caught lightning in a bottle.

Well, the whole surah can be read here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Holy_Qur%27an_(Maulana_Muhammad_Ali)/53._The_Star but I can't see where Mecca is mentioned?

― Frederik B, Tuesday, November 20, 2018 11:57 AM (six minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Mecca isn't mentioned it's just generally presumed that Mohammed was in Mecca prior to the Hijrah

(i also cribbed this factoid from Orientalist Sir Hamilton A.R. Gibb)

more from Gibb on that Surah -

From the angle of content, one remarkable feature of the dis-
course is the absence of any dogmatic slant. Its theme is the
lordship of God, the personal responsibility of the created be-
ing, and God's reward and punishment. There would seem to be an almost deliberate avoidance of the distinctive confessional
elements of either Judaism or Christianity, and an emphasis on the basic themes of a monotheistic faith divorced from both the
rival creeds. How bitter that rivalry had been in South Arabia is known from historical data. Arab tradition connects these
religious rivalries with the political designs of the surrounding imperial powers, but even had there been no political overtones there could well have been good reason for a native monotheistic movement in Arabia to seek an independent middle course. And such was in fact to become a cardinal element in Islam.8

I read the Quran last year, but it's hard to get the point of it in translation. Listening to the original Arabic, a lot of it is legitimately beautiful. Especially Surah 55:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD6Ov8JHTfk

Gopnik is usually a meh, but he can be useful in a survey kind of way:

That these stories, of the Garden and the Fall, are told so telegraphically surely indicates that their audiences were familiar with previous versions of them. And yet, Reynolds makes clear, no versions of what we now call the Old or New Testaments existed in Arabic when the Quran was composed—those texts would have been known almost exclusively through oral tradition and storytelling. There’s a strange irony here. The Christian Gospels were written in Greek, a language that Jesus and his followers didn’t speak, and certainly couldn’t read or write in (if they could read and write at all), and the version of the Jewish scriptures that the Gospels drew upon, the Septuagint, was also in Greek—which means that the Gospels as we have them emerged from behind a Hellenistic scrim. The Quran, in turn, draws from an overheard version of the Greek texts, probably as passed through North African and Syrian translations, so what we are witnessing is part of a centuries-old game of telephone, played throughout the ancient Middle East in many of its tongues.