According to Islamic teaching, Muhammed was the last of many prophets, including Abraham, Moses, Samuel, Isaiah, and Jesus. Muhammed was born in A.D. 571 at Mecca in Arabia. His father died a few days after he was born, and his mother died when he was six years old. His grandfather then cared for him, until his own death three years later, when Muhammed was taken into his uncle's home. He was pure-hearted and well loved, with a sweet and gentle disposition. His bereavements had made him especially sensitive to every form of human suffering, and he was always ready to help others, especially the poor and the weak. He came to be known as "The True," "The Upright," and "The Trustworthy One," due to his sense of honor, duty, and fidelity.
The society in which Muhammed lived has been described as barbaric. People had no sense of responsibility to anyone outside of their own Bedouin tribe. There were drunken orgies, often leading to brawls and bloodshed. In Mecca, gambling took place constantly, at all hours of the night until morning. Young women went from tent to tent arousing the passions of the men who occupied them. The prevailing religion was an animistic polytheism which provided very little check on moral attitudes and behavior.
At the age of twenty-five, Muhammed began working for a wealthy widow named Khadija. His prudence and integrity in the caravan business impressed her so greatly that they ended up getting married, although she was fifteen years older than him.
On the outskirts of Mecca was a huge, barren rock, Mount Hira, where there was a cave to which Muhammed often retreated. Among the many desert gods worshipped by the Meccans was Allah, who was considered the most impressive one, as Creator, supreme provider, and determiner of man's destiny. Muhammed came to be convinced that Allah was the one and only God.
On one particular night, "the Night of Power and Excellence," Muhammed was lying on the floor of the cave in contemplation, when a voice commanded him to cry. He resisted twice, but when the voice commanded "Cry!" for the third time, he asked what he should cry. He was given a few sentences, and as he aroused from his trance, he felt that the words had been deeply impressed upon him. He ran home terrified and, after a while, when he was able to regain some of his composure, he told his wife that he had become either a prophet or "one possessed-- mad." At first, she was incredulous, but after she heard the full story, she became his first convert. Muhammed had many doubts about whether the voice was really God's or whether it was of demonic origin, but his wife encouraged him. The voice returned frequently, and it commanded him to preach.
Muhammed did not claim to be a miracle-worker, but he did claim that, by his own devices, he could not have produced the Koran, which was said to be dictated to him directly by God in segments over a period of twenty-three years through voices that sounded like the "reverberating of bells," which, although seeming to vary at first, gradually became focused into a single voice which became identified as Gabriel's.
Muhammed's message of uncompromising monotheism threatened the revenues coming to Mecca from Bedouin pilgrimages to over three hundred shrines. Its moral teachings insisted upon an end to licentiousness, and the necessity of looking upon men as equal in the sight of God.
The reaction to this message was one of intense persecution from a licentious society ridden with class distinctions. This only caused Muhammed to throw himself more fully into preaching. He admonished the people to turn from their false gods, abandon their evil ways, and prepare for the day of judgement. After ten years, several hundred people had accepted Muhammed as God's prophet, but the rest of the city of Mecca seemed intensely opposed to him.
In Yathrib, a city about two hundred miles north of Mecca, Muhammed's teachings had begun to take a firm hold. However, the city faced many internal rivalries and needed a strong leader from elsewhere. A delegation of about 75 of its leading citizens went to Mecca to ask Muhammed if he would take on this responsibility. Muhammed pondered this proposal, and asked them to pledge that they would worship none but God, that they would observe Islam's principles and obey him in all that was right and defend him. When they agreed to these terms, he agreed to come.
When the leaders of Mecca heard of this, they attempted to prevent him from going, but he eluded them. He and a friend hid in a crevice south of the city, and horsemen searching for him came so close to finding them that his companion began to despair. Muhammed encouraged him and told him that God was with them, and, indeed, they were not discovered. After three days, they were able to escape by way of deserted roads to Yathrib. This Hegira or Hijrah (flight) took place in A.D. 622, and is the time from which Muslims date their calendar.
The city changed its name to Medina, and Muhammed was thrust into the role of a political leader, which he handled extremely well. His administration was described as an ideal blend of justice and mercy. He was gentle and merciful toward his own enemies, but as chief of state, he meted out punishment to those who were guilty of criminal acts towards other people. He continued to live an unpretentious life, remaining in an ordinary clay house, milking his own goats, and making himself accessible to all people, regardless of their economic or social status.
As time passed, he was able to bring the conflicting factions of the city into unity, including Arabs and Jews. His reputation spread, and people began flocking from all parts of Arabia to visit the man who had made this outstanding accomplishment. There were wars between Mecca and Medina, and Medina emerged victorious. Huston Smith writes:
The city that had treated him cruelly now lay at his feet with his old persecutors at his mercy. He refused, however, to press his victory; in the hour of his triumph the past was forgotten. Making his way to the famous Kaaba stone which had been the religious focus of Mecca since time immemorial and which he now rededicated to Allah, he accepted the almost mass conversion of the city but returned himself to Medina.Two years later, in 632 A.D. (10 A.H.), Muhammed died with virtually all of Arabia under his control. With all the power of armies, police, and civil service, no other Arab had ever succeeded in uniting his countrymen as he had. By the time a century had passed, his followers had conquered Armenia, Persia, Syria, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and Spain, and had crossed the Pyrenees into France. But for their defeat by Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D., the entire Western world might today be Muslim.1
According to Islam, the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures were authentic revelations from God, but they were revealed at earlier stages in man's spiritual development, and are therefore incomplete. Moreover, the Old and New Testaments, according to Islam, have become partially corrupted in the process of transmission. However, the Koran is the final and infallible revelation of God's will. According to Islam, the Koran is a miracle from God, since Muhammed had been so unskilled in writing that he could barely write his own name; yet the Koran embodies all wisdom and theology essential to human life and is grammatically perfect and without equal as a work of literature.
The Koran does not advocate the idea of pacifism, or of turning the other cheek. While it teaches forgiveness and the return of good for evil under certain circumstances, the Muslim is not to be a doormat for the ruthless. Without the punishment of wrongdoers, morality evaporates into mere sentimentality. Thus, in accordance with the Muslim concept of holy war (jihad), martyrs who die are assured of heaven.
One basic difference between Islam and the Judaeo-Christian tradition, therefore, has to do with the idea of vengeance. According to the Old and the New Testaments, it is God who is to be the avenger, not the individual. Quoting Deuteronomy 32:35, Paul writes in Romans 12:19 that one is not to avenge oneself, but that it is God Himself who, independent of our own individual actions, will exact vengeance.
Monotheism is a primary emphasis of Islam; Christians are not considered true monotheists, because they believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ. While Islam accepts Jesus as a prophet, and even His virgin birth, it nevertheless insists that the doctrines of the Incarnation and of the Trinity are violations of monotheism, and the one unforgivable sin is to associate anyone or anything with the Almighty.
According to Islam, the work of Jesus was left unfinished, being reserved for another teacher, Muhammed, who would systematize the laws of morality. Jesus did not live long enough to do this, but even if he had, mankind was not sufficiently advanced at the time of Jesus for the refined teachings of Muhammed. These teachings betray a basic misunderstanding of the mission of Jesus Christ, the primary purpose of which was to bring about man's redemption and reconciliation with God by His death and resurrection.
With respect to the crucifixion, the Koran states that it only appeared as though Jesus was crucified (Surah 4:156-158). Many Muslims believe that Judas was crucified in Christ's place, and that Christ was then taken up into heaven. According to Islamic teaching, Christ could not have been crucified because it is contrary to God's justice to permit the suffering of an innocent man on behalf of others, and contrary to His omnipotence not to be able to rescue a prophet in danger. Thus, since Jesus was not the one who was crucified, neither was he raised from the dead.
Of course, the cornerstone of Christianity is the resurrection of Jesus Christ. We have already examined the extensive evidence for the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without Christ's death and resurrection, there could not have been any redemption of the human race from sin, disease, aging, and death. Without the shedding of blood, there can be no forgiveness of sin, according to Hebrews 9:22. If Christ did not die, then we are still in our sins. And, if he was not raised, then our faith is in vain, as Paul says in I Corinthians 15:17, since it is His resurrection that assures us of resurrection and immortality.
Islam refers to Jesus as a prophet, but not as divine. We have seen, however, that there are many problems that arise if we reject Christ's claims for himself. It is not possible to refer to Christ as a prophet if His claims to divinity were false. He made these claims consistently, and they were the basis of the complaints of the Jews, who eventually saw to it that he was crucified because of what they considered to be the blasphemous nature of his claims to divinity.
The Koran argues that the records that we have of the Old and New Testaments have been corrupted during the transmission of the documents. We have already examined extensive evidence, however, that tremendous care was taken in the transmission of these texts. For example, the Dead Sea Scrolls demonstrate that the Masoretic text remained virtually unchanged from about two thousand years ago until the present day. As far as the New Testament is concerned, the manuscript attestation is far better than for any other classical text, and some of these manuscripts reach as far back as the second century. Moreover, there is considerable uniformity in the thousands of manuscripts now extant, although there are minor variations in phraseology. The Koran, on the other hand, offers no historical evidence for its assertions about the transmission of the texts of the Old and New Testaments, nor does it offer any evidence for the doubts it raises about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In Galatians 1:8,9, Paul wrote that if anyone were to preach a different gospel, he would be accursed:
But though we, or an angel from heaven, preach any other Gospel unto you than that which we have preached unto you, let him be accursed. As we said before, so say I now again, if any man preach any other Gospel unto you than that ye have received, let him be accursed.
Islam is not a refinement of Christianity, as it claims to be. Its teachings, as we have seen, contradict the basic teachings of Christianity: the divinity of Christ, the atoning work of Christ, and His death and resurrection, all of which are at the very core of the teachings of Jesus and of the apostles.
1 Huston Smith, The Religions of Man (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958), p. 209.