The Mother Book

I am pretty excited about the reading list for this class - it includes scholars that I am familiar with and adore as well as others I've never heard of. I'll link the books as readings from them are assigned. This week the main reading was from Claiming Abraham: Reading the Bible and Qur'an Side by Side by Michael Lodahl, who is a Christian theologian. I'm not going to do a big introduction on the book, or any of them, as most of the folks reading here are classmates who are also reading it but suffice to say he is comparing stories present in both Hebrew Scriptures and the Qur'an and doing critical analysis of them. His bias is clearly and obviously a Christian one, but at least he's honest about it. He is also honest about the potential problems inherent in dealing with the Qur'an in its English translation, and working with a sacred text from outside the community of faith that provides the primary context for interpretation.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all called "Abrahamic" faiths because each religious tradition claims Abraham (of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob fame) as their ancestor. For Judaism and Islam this claim is pretty literal - they see themselves as actual descendants of Abraham and participants in the promise that G-d made to him to make his descendants number as the stars. Christians see Abraham as their spiritual ancestor because Jesus was Jewish and so connected to Abraham. But having the Abraham connection doesn't mean that Abraham's ancestor-ship functions in the same way in all three faiths, so it doesn't necessarily provide as much common ground as one would think. Similarly, how Abraham is written about in the Hebrew Scriptures and Qur'an is quite different. He's just a different guy in the Qur'an, even though his circumstances bear resemblence to the circumstances of the Judeo-Christian Abraham. Really, the Abraham of Judaism and the Abraham of Christianity are pretty different from each other too, even though their source texts are the same.

One of the interesting aspects of the relationship between Islam, Christianity and Judaism that Lodahl really highlighted for me has to do with Islam being the youngest of the three religions. This means that the Qur'an is in many ways in dialogue or acting in response to the internal issues within each of the other two religions as well as the fights they were having with each other over issues of scriptural interpretation, theology, practice and what not. E told us in class last week that most of the biblical characters us Judeo-Christian folk are familiar with are present in the Qur'an but "they're all cleaned up." Lodahl suggests that Mohammad, blessings be upon him, saw all of this and worked for something more clear, something that didn't have the messiness of the Abraham who argued with God and lied to his son, or the scandal of Lot and his daughters.

Mohammad, blessings be upon him, would not have described what he was doing as editing. For Muslims the Qur'an is a perfect copy (when in its original language of Arabic) of the "Mother Book" a heavenly version of scripture that all translations are based upon, including Hebrew Scripture and the Christian New Testament. So for Islam the other two Abrahamic religions are "People of the Book" because their scriptures, while corrupted, are still based upon the heavenly Mother Book.

Ack, so finally I'm getting to what I really wanted to talk about in this post - this concept of something perfect and heavenly being reflected here in the physical world. The Mother Book is strongly reminiscent of Platonic perfect forms, to me, and something that I do have a strong reaction against. I think what I resist in the idea (as I understand it) of the Mother Book is the otherworldly focus, the suggestion that the physical created world is not good enough for God. And this idea is not something unique to Islam. There are plenty of Christians who believe that we are just waiting around for the return of Christ so God can destroy this world and make a new and better one. This is not my belief and ultimately I don't think it's a belief that can be reconciled with the Judeo Christian scriptures. I am curious to see how this theme plays out as we go deeper and learn more.