With so many transnational challenges facing the human race collectively — climate change, violence against innocents, nuclear proliferation, cyber-hacking — it is important as this new year begins that we remember and underscore our common heritage and humanity more than our divisions.
The world’s 2.4 billion Christians, 1.8 billion Muslims, and 15 million Jews — half the world’s population — may turn to several common spiritual wellsprings. The ancient Hebrews gave us the idea of one God, Yahweh. Christ, a Jew, said he came not to overturn Jewish law but to fulfill it and instructed his followers to love this God with their whole hearts, souls, minds and strength.
{mosads}Six centuries latter Muhammad asserted the most fundamental pillar of Islam: There is one God (Allah) and Muhammad is his prophet. Knowledgeable of both Moses and Christ, he maintained that his messages from Allah complemented and completed rather than contradicted their messages.
Christians worship Jesus as the Christ and Muslims praise him as a prophet, some Muslims even celebrating his birth. In recent reporting on Christmas in Lebanon, Muslim woman Nada Suweidan was convinced of the religious appropriateness of her family’s Christmas celebration, including her brother dressing up as Santa Claus. She maintained: “Jesus isn’t only for the Christians.” Ahmad Tarjoman, a Muslim who works for Iranian state television and whose family also celebrates Christmas, indicated: “We follow Imam Ali, who told us to respect other cultures.”
Addressing him numerous times in their holy scriptures, all three religions also share in the honoring of Abraham (Ibrahim for Muslims) as their father and spiritual patriarch.b
Whether he actually lived or not some 4,000 years ago is beside the point for Rabbi Menachem Froman who lives near Hebron, the place where Abraham is supposed to have bought a cave to entomb himself and his family. “Abraham is a message of loving kindness. Abraham is an idea.” For Muslims, Abraham — prepared to sacrifice his son in accordance with God’s will — stands as the prototype of the Muslim ideal of submission to Allah, the literal meaning of the word Islam.
All three religions (as do Buddhism, Hinduism, and Zoroastrianism) share a belief in the presence and influence of angels. Angels appear in more than half of the books of the Bible. They told Abraham not to kill his son, and they sang at the birth of Christ and rolled the stone away from his tomb after his death. Muslims believe angels register the prayers of the faithful and testify for or against them on Judgment Day.
The angel Gabriel holds a special place in two of the religions. Christians believe Gabriel visited Mary in Nazareth and told her: “You are to conceive and bear a son, and you must name him Jesus.” (Luke 1, 31) In the Muslim, tradition it was the angel Gabriel who visited Muhammad in AD 610 and told him to “Recite. In the name of thy Lord Creator, who created mankind from a clot of blood, recite!” From these angelic visits came the words from Allah through Muhammad that comprise the Muslim holy book, the Qur’an, the first book of any significance written in Arabic.
In addition to these religious bindings, Jews, Christians, and Muslims all share fundamental secular values such as equality. Jesus repeatedly criticized the hypocrisy and arrogance of the Jewish leaders and maintained that he who would be first must be last.
Drawing from the ideas of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson, a founding father of the predominantly Christian United States, first codified the self-evident truth in the U.S. Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. A century later at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln reminded all that the American nation was “dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”
Muhammad was very much distressed by the class divisions of Mecca. A political as well as a religious leader, he stressed equality and social justice. In contrast to the polytheism of the Arab tribes around the Mecca of his time, he proclaimed the one god, Allah. The implication was dramatic: One god meant one people. Four centuries later in his comprehensive “History of India,” the Muslim scholar al-Biruni underscored this in addressing the one significant difference between Muslims and Hindus: “We regard all men as equal except in piety.”
Second, all three have valued, fostered, and complemented each other in the pursuit of truth — scientific and philosophical, as well as spiritual. While medieval Europe had simply a veneer of the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, Muslim scholars during the 8th and 9th centuries translated many key works of classical Greece and put them into the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, works which European universities later translated into Latin.
From Muslim scholars the West obtained its Arabic numbering system, algebra, and the perfected astrolabe, the instrument European explorers used in their trips to discover the New World. The Muslim Ibn Sina wrote a medical encyclopedia which, translated into Latin, became the basic medical textbook for university students in medieval Europe. Modern astronomy is founded on the work of the Muslim al-Tusi of the 13th century.
For some five centuries, the Arabic language was indeed the lingua franca of learning — science, art, medicine, and philosophy. It was the introduction of this accumulated knowledge into Western Europe that laid the foundation for the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries.
{mossecondads}Perhaps most important are the examples of where the three religions valued tolerance more than religious orthodoxy, current realities rather than the words of a past deity favoring one particular religion over another. No better example exists than the Muslim city of Cordoba which the German Christian nun Hroswitha called the “ornament of the world.” Ruled by the Muslim Umayyad dynasty in Spain — or al Andalus as Muslims called it — Muslims, Christians, and Jews coexisted for three centuries in the Middle Ages and created a unique culture through toleration, adoption of the Arabic language, and separate rule.
Let us all remember the now famous photo “Earthrise,” taken 50 years ago by Apollo 8 astronaut William Anders which dramatically portrays our common heritage and destiny on this unique planet, terribly vulnerable and insignificant against the vast backdrop of space. In the words of poet Archibald MacLeish who wrote an essay to accompany the photo: “To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together.”
For the common good of people of these three faiths and indeed the other half of humanity, we might all remember in the new year our common ancestry from the seeds of Abraham, look more toward him and less toward Isaac and Ishmael, and remember more that which binds us rather than separates us.
Fred Zilian teaches history and politics at Salve Regina University.