Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

4 t CHAPTER ONE
the same Creator God who covenanted with Abraham and dispatched
the prophets to their tasks, and although he is perhaps
more dominantly central to the Quran than Yahweh to the Bible,
he is not portrayed in the same manner as his biblical prototype.
The Allah of the Quran is at once more powerful yet unmistakably
more remote than Yahweh. Allah controls all, but from a distance;
he is a universal deity quite unlike the Yahweh who in the early
books of the Bible follows close on every step of the Israelites.
Allah had his own, quite different history, which we can to some
extent construct from the cult of the deity of that name who in pre-
Islamic days was worshiped all across the Fertile Crescent and
Arabia by the polytheistic Arabs. Though both the Quran and its
Meccan audience knew at least part of that history, very little of it
is laid out in the Quran. Later Islamic generations, who cared
nothing about Allah’s pre-Islamic career, had the quranic portrait
of their God filled out by Muslim authors, many of them converts
from Judaism or Christianity, who were well aware of Yahweh’s
biblical history, but the Muslims’ notion of God, though in its
main lines identical with the Bible’s, has very different nuances of
detail. The portrait of Yahweh that unfolds in the Bible is both
more complex and psychologically nuanced and more directly engaged
in history, if not in secondary causality, than the majestic but
rather abstract and remote Allah of the Quran. Allah: A Biography
is not a very plausible project.
The Bible in the Quran
The Quran’s links to the Bible continue well beyond Creation. Before
the Quran ends, it has touched on Adam, Cain and Abel,
Noah and the Flood, Abraham and his sons Ishmael and Isaac,
Lot, Jacob, Joseph and his brethren, Moses and Aaron, the Pharaoh,
the escape of the Israelites from Egypt, Saul, David, Solomon,
Jonah, and Job. Jesus and Mary have their own considerable
place there as well, as we shall see. This is a fairly extensive repertoire,
but the absences are equally interesting. Though the Quran
was obviously interested in prophecy and the prophetic office, and