Islam: A Guide for Jews and Christians - Electric Scotland

58 t CHAPTER THREE
What God required of the Meccans, the Quran instructed, was
“submission” (Ar. islam; one who has so submitted is a muslim) to
God, the God, who is none other than the High God Allah worshiped
at Mecca; the “Lord of this house,” the Quran calls him,
referring to the Kaaba or central shrine of Mecca. Muhammad had
no need to introduce the Meccans to Allah: they already worshiped
him, and in moments of crisis, as we have seen, they even
conceded that he was in fact the God. The trouble was, they worshiped
other gods as well, and that is one of the central aims of the
Meccan preaching: to make the Quraysh and the other Meccans
surrender their attachment to other deities, the idols and empty
names they associated with the One True God.
This was the theological or cultic point of the early preaching,
but from the beginning Islam was far more than an acceptance of
monotheism. The Quran called on the Meccans to change their
moral ways. A look at the very earliest suras shows that the reformation
was overwhelmingly social, and perhaps economic, in its
emphases. The Quran would eventually go on to speak of many
things, but the original form of the message was narrowly targeted:
it is good to feed the poor and take care of the needy; it is
evil to accumulate wealth solely for one’s own behalf.
This message got scant hearing from the Quraysh, whether they
thought that monotheism would lessen the appeal of Mecca as a
pilgrimage center (surely one of the gravest miscalculations in the
history of commerce) or because they did not relish Muhammad’s
brand of social and economic reform. The early suras reflect the
criticism directed back at the messenger. The heat of the quranic
preaching begins to rise in reaction. There are now fierce denunciations
of the scoffers and unbelievers: for them is reserved a fiery
hell, just as the believers would have reserved for them a true paradise
of peace and pleasurable repose. At this point both the language
and the imagery suddenly become familiar to the Jewish or
the Christian reader. The promised paradise is called the “Garden
of Eden” (Jannat Adan) and the threatened hell, “Gehenna”
(Jahannam).
The Quran early on unveils, in bits and pieces, its eschatological
vision, not to stress its absolute imminence, as in the New Testa-