What are the reasons why Christians do not believe that Prophet Muhammad peace be upon him was a of Allah?My response was necessarily condensed (because it's on a forum where long answers are not best given in the interest of maintaining a dialogue. Longer pieces are generally best referred off list to blog posts or articles elsewhere.
I suspect a lot of Christians, on the basis that prophecy is a gift of the spirit (and if they are not among those who believe said gifts ceased to be bestowed once the NT canon was fixed) could entertain the idea that Mohammed might be, in some sense, a prophet. However, in the mirror-image of some Muslim claims that the NT must have been corrupted because it is interpreted as failing to confirm the Qu'ran and sunna, the same misalignment would be seen to disqualify (from a Christian point of view) at least some of the revelations attributed to Mohammed.
There is another potential difficulty (though I've never seen or heard it discussed): the means of revelation; by and large, revelations given by angels are attributed to the angel, not to the person who hears or sees them. A prophet is generally understood to have received the revelation directly themselves.For those less familiar with Muslim and Christian perspectives in this area of consideration, some elucidations might be in order.
So first off, as I understand it. Mohammed, according to the story as I have heard it and read it, was meditating according to his practice in a cave when he was seized and held tight by an angel ("Jibreel" which is the Arabic for 'Gabriel') and told to "Recite" (the word Qur'an roughly translates as 'Recitation'). He then receives revelations over the next few years (I have always presumed that Jibreel was the continuing conveyancer, but I guess that could be wrong). Eventually these recitals were written down and put into order before the memorisers died out.
I guess that it is Muhammed's role as the one who reveals the angel's words that attracts the title 'prophet'. I note, however, that the Shahada (the Muslim root declaration of faith: "I testify that there is one God and Muhammed is the messenger of God"). There is some evidence to suggest that for a time the first clause of the Shahada was the only clause and at some point later the declaration about Muhammed was added. It's interesting that this designates Muhammed as "rasul" of God. The word rasul is not really prophet but 'messenger' or sometimes "apostle" (one sent with a message). So, the root declaration of Muslim faith does not assert Mohammed as a prophet.
Many Christians automatically reject an assertion that Mohammed is a prophet of God because the difference between the message of Islam as it is propounded today and the basic understandings of the Christian gospel appear to be contradictory. If Christian proclamation is basically right, then Muslim proclamation must be to some degree flawed. Therefore, the reasoning goes; either but not both messages can be accepted.
Of course, it may be possible to dig into those basic stances and problematise them. And dialogue sometimes does.
There is also the understanding of what a prophet might be. I write as a Christian and I confess that I have not looked extensively at what Muslim traditions might say about prophethood. I would assume, from the way that Muslim friends and acquaintances have reasoned in my presence, that the term to some degree is defined by the person of Mohammed. This a priori is not an approach Christians on the whole would give much weight to; we'd have to be Muslims to accept it methodologically. We can understand the move, however, by analogy, since it is similar to Christian practice of understanding the Divine by central reference to Jesus benMaryam of Nazareth (as a recent theologian put it: "God is Christlike, and in God there is no unChristlikeness at all").
Broadly speaking the Christian world seems to work with a couple of overlapping views of prophethood. One derives from the Seer/Man of God strand in the Hebrew Bible and carries through to the ministries of men like Jeremiah. The other is the New Testament strand which sees prophecy as a ministry of the church which seems to be about either predicting events (see Agabus in Acts) or revealing hidden but present realities enabling the churches to respond well to situations.
As I point out above, the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures both seem to distinguish on the one hand between revelations borne to humankind by angels where the angels are given credit for bearing the message and on the other hand messages which appear in the consciousness of people directly by the influence of the Holy Spirit. There are some Christians who would assert that this kind of prophecy has passed away because the closing of the canon of the New Testament. The point being, in this view, that such direct revelation from God is made unnecessary by the existence of the God-inspired Scriptures. For those who accept the possibility of such direct revelation in post-apostolic times, the datum of God-inspired Scriptures means that new revelations must not fundamentally contradict the Scriptures.
Obviously, a Christian in the ceased-revelation school of thought cannot even begin to entertain any claim of new revelation by Mohammed or anyone else, whether or not the label 'prophet' is used. For those in the continuing revelation way of thinking it may not be ruled out of necessity, but the incongruencies of message would. For this school too, the claim to prophethood would look odd against a background of direct revelation if it is actually an angelically mediated message.
The other thing to bear in mind from the Christian point of view is that if Christian claims about Jesus are about right, then there is no greater revelation possible of or from God. The best that Mohammed could do would be to prepare for or clarify the implications of the Christ event. So there is often some incredulity towards the Muslim exaltation of Mohammed over Jesus: it just seems like a category error of the order of magnitude of asking "who made God?".
So could Christians in any way accept the idea that Mohammed was "rasul" of God? Well, if the Qur'an as we have it and the interpretive tradition around it are taken at face value, probably not. The denial of Jesus's ultimacy and decisiveness in the purposes of God by Muslim tradition leaves little but contradiction. The denial of the crucifixion and the misinterpretation of the idea of Trinity have to count against being able to take what we are presented with as the revelation to Mohammed as being of God.
At least, at those points.
But what if the Muslim tradition as it has been presented to us, is in fact 'corrupted'? (And this is a reflex of Muslim claims of corruption of the Bible). First off we might consider that not everything Muslims claim as God's will is actually in the Qur'an. The Qur'an actually only ever names three daily prayers -like Judaic practice and early Christian practice. it is Sunna/tradition that separates out evening prayers into three. So this kind of glimpse into an evolving tradition held together by collections of sayings and doings of Mohammed himself (who moves from being a 'mere' messenger by this to being a perfect exemplar of God's revelation). There is quite some doubt about these hadith and they are generally accepted by the scholarly efforts of early-ish Muslim commentators like Bukhari. But, while revered in the accepted traditions, these collections of hadith that are accepted as well attested may not actually be so.
All of this leaves a possibility of interpreting Mohammed as some kind of man of God, with a ministry to the Arabs. It may have been that his fate could have been to have been like some of the more obscure prophets mentioned in the Hebrew Bible whose words were not much preserved (like Nathan, who came before David and whose only recorded words were to bring David up short with a parable and its application). Perhaps his memory became politically useful for a nascent Arab empire facing two superpower theocracies and needing a counter-narrative to bolster legitimacy and make connection. And so the figure of Mohammed attracted a stories and sayings which eventually become consolidated in a Qur'an and further on in Hadith and Sunna.
So, if this was possible as a way of looking at Muhammed, then it might be possible for some Christians at least to see him as a man with a vocation to call Arabs to worship one God and to draw them towards the Judeo-Christian revelations. However, we would also want to say that we are fairly skeptical about what is presented by the developed Muslim traditions but believing that there might be at core some genuine experience of God.
The later Muslim traditions about Mohammed turn him into an intercessor and a kind of perfect example of a human being (because what else could someone touched by God to make the final revelation to humankind be?). Christians might be forgiven for suspecting, when we learn of this, that the Christ-shaped hole in the story being filled by Mohammed is suspicious but interesting. It should be noted that this probably drives a Muslim assertion that prophets are all sinless. Of course from the Jewish and Christian perspective this is a claim too far, since our scriptures do not show or claim this of 'prophetic' figures. Part of their 'charm' in our traditions of interpretation is that they are right only in part but can be uncomprehending and wrong at times. If this could be recognised by Muslims as a possibility which could also apply to Mohammed, then they might have less difficulty dealing with some rather scary hadiths.
The problem, it seems to me, for Muslims, is that their tradition has become fossilised at points and in ways that give little room for manoeuvre. That's a shame, because there could be ways for them to reconsider various things if only later tradition hadn't hardened in ways inimical towards Christian claims as they were (mis)understood at that point.
Of course, my kind of recognition of Mohammed's possible prophethood would be scant comfort to orthodox Islam. My guess is that the original question could have been prompted by a desire to help Christians recognise Mohammed as The Prophet rather than just a prophet. There are understandable reasons for this to be found in the way that the evaluation of the figure of Mohammed evolved towards (in Christian terms) a Christ-substitute (as intermediary between humans and God, as perfect exemplar of God's will etc). However, for Muslims who might be willing to entertain the possibility that the Muslim tradition may have picked up a few bugs and errors in the course of transmission, there are some interesting further conversations to be had. Without that, we'll just have to map out the differences of interpretation and agree to differ, but at least knowing better how we differ and why our respective starting places don't really cut it in the other tradition.
No comments:
Post a Comment