By the time of Muhammad early in the seventh century, Christianity had survived its internal crises and established its key doctrines in the form they are known today in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions.  Central to this teaching were the ideas of the Trinity--that there are three persons in one God--and the Incarnation--that Jesus was one person with both a human and a divine nature.   While this technically preserved Christianity as a monotheist tradition, anyone not well trained in theology might easily find the emphasis on both the Trinity and the Incarnation to be very troubling.  It was clearly unacceptable to Jews, who were unwilling to see the Tanakh supplemented by what the Christians called their "New Testament."  It would also prove unacceptable to the man referred to in the Islamic world simply as the Prophet.

The Qur'an, the collection of 114 Arabic texts in which Muhammad records what he has heard from God while in an ecstatic state, is a document completely unlike what we have met so far in world religious literature.  Unlike the sacred scriptures of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism or Christianity, the Qur'an is composed by a single individual over a great number of years.  The sections (suras) are not organized chronologically or thematically but simply from the longest to the shortest, and, unlike the Bible, only the original Arabic text is seen as acceptable for use in public prayer and private devotion.

Muhammad's effort to establish Islam in his own city of Mecca was not initially successful and he was forced to escape to the city of Medina in 622, the year which Muslims came to use as the first in their calendar.  He returned in victory to Mecca eight years later, but died suddenly two years after that.  By this time his teaching had taken hold not just among the Arabs who had worshipped a collection of tribal gods but among those Christians who had been disturbed by the theological rulings that seemed to compromise monotheism.  Islam did revere Jesus as a prophet and also accepted  that his mother had conceived him while a virgin, but in no way would Jesus be regarded as divine.

From the beginning in Islam there was never the distinction between church and state that Jews and Christians had learned to live with in the Roman Empire.  A key reason is that the Qur'an presents God as the only source of authority and so the only lawgiver that a Muslim could obey in good conscience.  A human ruler, such as Muhammad himself in Medina and then those who were his successors, were in a sense God's lieutenants.  Predictably, the political role of anyone not a devout Muslim would be limited, but this did not take the form of cultural exclusion seen in the Christian west in the treatment of Jews.   Because these children of Abraham's second son (the older son is Ishmael, legendarily the ancestor of the Arab peoples) were still "people of the Book,"  Muslims made no effort to convert them, and in the centuries to come the greatest Jewish writers and thinkers (Maimonides, for instance) were highly respected individuals who worked in freedom in the great Muslim cities.  However, even though they were allowed freedom of worship, Christians were not allowed to proselytize and a Muslim converting to Christianity could face a death penalty in that (as in the Christian West in the Middle Ages) apostasy was seen as equivalent to treason.

The internal struggles that divided Islam into the two great factions of Sunnite and Shiite centered on the struggle for power shortly after Muhammad's death.  One group, the Shiites who make up about a tenth of the world's Muslims, followed his son-in-law Ali, killed in battle, and continued to hold that the last of the dozen true successors would still return in the future.  The majority are the Sunnites, who represent the most familiar vision of Islam throughout the world.

Islam, like Judaism and Christianity, did diversify further.  One powerful movement is that of the Sufis, who argued for a mystical vision and also a monastic way of life that shows Indian influence.  One less appreciated aspect of Islam is the fact that so many of those Africans captured and brought as slaves to the Americas were Muslims (a point brought out in the book and TV series "Roots"), and in recent years many African-Americans have worked to redefine their heritage through movements such as the Nation of Islam.

A critical factor in the cultural history of Islam was the appearance of European colonization in India and the various island chains to its east in the last two hundred years and the European control through the Mideast following World War I.  With independence, as in Pakistan or Egypt or Algeria, has come an effort to link nationalism with a Muslim fundamentalism that calls for replacing western-style legal codes with the shariah, the code established through the Qur'an.  In principle this runs contrary to our familiar notions of a separation of church and state and a religious pluralism.  In the United States, where the number of Muslims may at this point be greater than the number of Jews, it creates a tension for many Muslims who are less sure how to reconcile traditional practices with normal American life.

At this point we should note again that the majority of  Jews in the world live in the United States, and here most have developed traditions (such as the Reform movement) which downplay traditional ethnic differences and are willing, for example, to accept intermarriage.  Also, it is quite possible to be a strictly secular Jew.  Islam, however, is a definite system of beliefs and practices, in many ways far less complicated than what we see in either Judaism (for practices) or Christianity (for beliefs), and it does not make much sense to speak of a secular Muslim.

The Islamic community in the United States is still a minority among the world's Muslims, and the great period of immigration is much more recent than it is for American Jews.  Typically, individual American Muslims have assimilated by ignoring the rules of the Qur'an (which do not just prohibit alcohol but standard business practices that involve interest on loans), but as the communities grow there will predictably be more of a demand to "modernize" rather than face exclusion.

REVIEW QUESTIONS FOR SECTION A:

(1) Who was Muhammad?
(2)  How does the Qur'an differ from the other religious texts we have looked at in this course?
(3)  How does the Qur'an tell the story of Abraham and his sons?
(4)  What is the major division among Muslims?
(5)  What is the shariah?  What are some of the provisions in its code that differ from conventional legal practices in the United States and Europe?

Since 9/11 our understanding of Islam has largely been a response to the Islamic fundamentalism seen with Osama Bin Laden or with the suicide bombers in Israel or Iraq.  As you go through the sources indicated here and in your text do make every attempt to see the difference between what beliefs are accepted by most Muslims and the outlook of the self-styled jihadists.  An additional source is the very well-done Frontline series on PBS.