Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

DEFINING AND DEFENDING BELIEVERS t 187
the pagans of Mecca, “You have your religion (din) and I have
mine” (109:6).
The believers thus saw themselves as members of an identifiable
group, and they organized themselves as such, even at times in a
form close to something we might call a state. The three faith communities
are in fact metasocieties whose special quality derives
from their being founded by divine decree and as part of a divine
plan. The famous covenant concluded by God with Abraham is
the founding charter of that sense of community, and all subsequent
claims of monotheist affiliation go back to it. Although this
covenant was initiated and in a sense dictated by God, its adherents
must, like Abraham himself, assent to it.
Identity Markers
We have just seen the overarching religious context of the monotheist
communities’ identification. But from the beginning, each
had also to define itself against its immediate neighbors and rivals.
Muhammad’s first concern was, like that of the early Israelites, to
mark his community by its monotheism, in contrast to the prevalent
idolatry and polytheism of Mecca and Arabia generally: we
are “believers” (muminun) and “submitters” (muslimun); you are
“unbelievers” (kafirun) and “associators” (mushrikun), the Quran
asserts at every turn. As the Muslim community took shape
around that basic marker, other identity issues arose, in the first
instance by the presence in Medina of a Jewish community that
could, and apparently did, deny Muhammad’s implicit inclusion of
his submitters in some supposed community of monotheists—
what later came to be called, with a somewhat different marker,
the Peoples of the Book. In its Medina suras the Quran thus takes
up the task of distinguishing the Muslims from both the Jews and
the Christians by recourse to the notion of a “religion of Abraham,”
a faith community that antedated both Judaism and Christianity
and of which the Muslims were the most authentic representatives.