Mahmoud Ayoub, a Muslim scholar with a deep knowledge of Christianity, once drew a parallel between the Prophet Muhammad and the Virgin Mary: the prophet brought the Qur'an into the world, and the Qur'an can be seen as the incarnate word of God. It's much more than a sacred text: its written and spoken Arabic form embody its meaning, and any translation is seen merely as a commentary on the original. Reciting the daily prayers taken from it, with the appropriate movements, could be compared to taking holy communion. The comparison may offend some Muslims and Christians...
I have been promoting the idea (based on an insight from, I think, Kenneth Cragg) that when we converse with Muslims we should be wary of comparing scriptures and founders which is the typical phenemenological approach. Rather, we should recognise the place that these 'things' have in the thoughtscape of their respective religious worlds. It would be more useful, I have argued, to think about Jesus in relation to the Qur'an and the Bible in relation to Hadith and Sunna. So it's good to find a suitably qualified Muslim scholar making a congruent point.
As for offense: deal with it; it's potentially inherent in dialogue. My belief in the incarnation cannot but be offensive to Muslim orthodoxy, for example. Muslim 'promotion' of Mohammed to intecessor status (not Salafis though) is offensive to Christian beliefs.
The rest of the article is interesting too and ends with an interesting thought-experiment in orthoparataxonomy between atheism and monotheisms:
An image stays in my mind of Richard Dawkins, a high priest of fundamentalist atheism, in his documentary The Root of All Evil? He could have been a sixth-century Celtic monk as he flung his arms wide in a wilderness to bear witness to what some might call the glory of creation. Do we dare translate "Creator God" to "the big bang" or "evolution" and back again, to see what might be lost - or found - in translation?
I've often felt that reading some supposedly scientific articles on evolution, that the personification of nature seemed to be covering up a loss of god-language. I've sometimes despaired that some agnostic and atheist writers seem unable to understand the point about giving up teleology with God.
Orthoparataxonomy? Made it up: "right-beside-classification"; ie comparing things rightly.
Face to faith | Guardian daily comment | Guardian Unlimited:
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