Justified True Belief

(●) The Meccan merchant who said an angel had given him God’s own words, and whose followers, the Muslims, now number close to two billion. + Muhammad ibn Abdullah was a trader in a dusty caravan town when, at about forty, he began telling people that a voice had commanded him to recite. The recitations went on for twenty-three years, and they became the Qur’an. By the time he died in 632 most of the tribes of Arabia had been brought, for the first time in their history, under a single confession of one God. Within a hundred years his community ruled from Spain to the edge of India. For a Christian reader he matters in a way that no other founder does. Islam is the one great faith that arose after Christ and set out to correct the Christian record at its center. It gives Jesus more honor than any other non-Christian tradition: he is a prophet, the Messiah, born of a virgin, a worker of miracles, and he will return. It also denies, flatly, that he is the Son of God and that he died on a cross. Everything Christians and Muslims have argued about for fourteen centuries runs back through this one man’s life. Here is the fact that shapes every page written about him: he wrote nothing. The Qur’an is presented as words he received and recited, and it was gathered into a book within a generation of his death. The fullest early biography of him, by Ibn Ishaq, comes to us in a later editor’s version and was composed more than a century after he died. So the sources for his life are rich, detailed, and later than the life, which is why careful writers on all sides mark what is firm and what is remembered.

(●) c. 570 AD: Born in Mecca to the clan that kept the shrine, and orphaned before he was ten. + Mecca was a trading town in a bare valley in western Arabia, and its business was partly religion. At its center stood the Kaaba, a cube-shaped shrine that housed the idols of many tribes and drew pilgrims and their money from across the peninsula. His clan, the Banu Hashim, belonged to the Quraysh, the tribe that ran the town and looked after the shrine, and it carried more prestige than cash. His father Abdullah died before he was born. His mother Amina died when he was about six, and the grandfather who took him in, Abd al-Muttalib, died about two years after that. So the boy passed to his uncle Abu Talib, a man of standing with a large family and thin means, who took him along on the caravan runs north to Syria. Losing both parents and then a guardian before the age of ten is worth pausing on: the Qur’an he later recited returns again and again to the orphan and the treatment owed him. Muslim tradition dates his birth to the Year of the Elephant, remembered as the year an Abyssinian army with a war elephant marched on Mecca, and the traditional reckoning puts that at 570. The Muslim biographers worked out these early dates generations later by counting backwards, so the year is a convention rather than a record, and the dates before 610 are all traditional in the same way.

(●) c. 595 AD: A widow who ran a caravan business proposed to him, and for twenty-five years he had one wife. + Khadija bint Khuwaylid was a Meccan businesswoman who financed trading caravans and hired agents to take them north. She hired the young Muhammad, was pleased with the return and with the man, and sent word that she would marry him. He was about twenty-five. Tradition says she was about forty, though some early reports make her younger. The marriage lasted until her death and he took no other wife while she lived, which in that time and place is worth noticing. They had, by the traditional account, two sons who died as infants and four daughters, of whom Fatima is the best remembered. Neighbors called him al-Amin, the trustworthy, the sort of nickname a town gives a man it lets hold the money. He had also begun to withdraw. Each year, the biographers say, he spent time alone in a cave on Mount Hira above the town, praying in the manner of the hanifs, a handful of Arabs who had given up the idols and looked for the God of Abraham without becoming either Jews or Christians.

(●) 610 AD: In the cave above Mecca a presence seized him and told him to recite, and he went home shaking. + The oldest account of that night comes from his wife Aisha, preserved in the collection of al-Bukhari. He was alone on Hira, by the tradition in Ramadan, the month Muslims now fast through, when something came to him and said, "Read." He answered that he was not a reader. It pressed him until he could bear no more, released him, and said it again, three times over, and then gave him the words: "Read, in the name of thy Lord! Who created man from congealed blood!" What is striking about the story his own community preserved is the terror in it. He did not come down the mountain radiant. He came home trembling and said, "Cover me, cover me," and lay under a cloak, and told Khadija he feared for himself. She told him God would not disgrace a man who carried other people’s burdens, and took him to her elderly cousin Waraqa ibn Nawfal, who had become a Christian and knew the scriptures. Waraqa said that what had come to him was the same messenger that came to Moses, and warned him that his own people would drive him out. He also said he wished he might live to see it, and he died soon after. Then, by the tradition, nothing came for a while, and the silence frightened him worse than the voice had.

(●) 613 to 622 AD: Preaching one God in a town that lived by many cost him his protectors and at last his home. + For about three years the message stayed inside his household and a few friends. When he began preaching in public, around 613, the content was simple and hard: there is one God, the dead will be raised, everyone will be judged, the orphan and the beggar have claims on the rich, and the idols in the shrine are nothing at all. A town whose income depended on pilgrims coming to those idols heard the last point loudest. The persecution fell heaviest on converts with no clan to protect them, especially the enslaved. In 615 he sent a group of followers across the Red Sea to Abyssinia, a Christian kingdom, where the ruler heard them recite the Qur’an’s account of Mary and refused to hand them back. For roughly three years, from about 616, the Quraysh boycotted his whole clan, cutting off trade and marriage until the agreement collapsed. Then came the year the sources call the Year of Sorrow. In about 619 Khadija died, and Abu Talib died in the same season. His uncle had never accepted the message but had shielded him for nine years, and the new head of the clan would not. He walked to the hill town of Taif to look for a hearing and was chased out by boys throwing stones. It was in these years, tradition holds, that he was taken in a single night to Jerusalem and from there through the heavens, the journey Muslims call the Isra and the Mi’raj, the night journey and the ascent. The way out came from Yathrib, an oasis two hundred and fifty miles north, where feuding clans wanted an outside arbitrator. Their delegates met him in secret at Aqaba and pledged loyalty, and in 622, with an assassination plot forming, he slipped out of Mecca with Abu Bakr and made the journey north.

(●) 622 AD: Yathrib, which took the name Medina, invited him to govern it, and the preacher became a head of state. + The move to Yathrib is called the hijra, the emigration, and Muslims count their years from it: dates in the Islamic calendar are marked AH, in the year of the hijra. The town took a new name, Medina, the city of the Prophet. What happened there changed the shape of everything he taught, because a man who had been a persecuted preacher was now an arbitrator, a lawgiver, a judge, and a commander. An early document usually called the Constitution of Medina, preserved in Ibn Ishaq, bound the emigrants from Mecca, the local converts, and the town’s Jewish clans into one community for mutual defense, with each group keeping its own religion. The change is visible in the recitations themselves. The Meccan chapters are short, urgent, rhythmic, full of judgment and the mercy of God. The Medinan chapters are long and legislative: inheritance, marriage, contracts, war, treaties. About a year and a half in, the direction of prayer moved from Jerusalem to the Kaaba at Mecca. His household grew in Medina too. After Khadija’s death he married again, and then again, until the traditional lists count eleven or more marriages, several of them the sort of alliance that seals a treaty or shelters a widow. Two of the best known bind him to his closest lieutenants: Aisha, daughter of Abu Bakr, and Hafsa, daughter of Umar. Two of the marriages have drawn Christian criticism for as long as Christians have written about him, and the first thing to say about them is where they come from. Neither is a tale told by his opponents. Both are reported by his own community, and one of them is dealt with in the Qur’an itself. He married Zaynab bint Jahsh, who had been the wife of Zayd, the freedman he had adopted as a son. In a society where an adopted son counted as a son, that looked to Medina like taking a daughter-in-law, and a revelation answered the scandal directly and ended adoption as a bar to marriage (Qur’an 33:37). The other is Aisha. The reports in al-Bukhari say she was betrothed to him at six and that the marriage was consummated when she was nine and he was in his fifties. Some modern Muslim scholars argue from other details in the same sources that she must have been older. What is not in doubt is that the reports themselves are old, and that the men who wrote them down did not suppose they were recording anything scandalous.

(●) 624 to 627 AD: Three battles in four years, and after the last of them the men of a Jewish clan were killed in the market place. + The emigrants had walked out of Mecca and left their property behind them, and in Medina they began intercepting the caravans of the men who now held that property. That is how the fighting started. In March 624 a raiding party of about three hundred met a Meccan relief force perhaps three times its size at the wells of Badr and beat it. For a community that eighteen months earlier had been slipping out of town at night, an outnumbered victory looked like a good deal more than luck, and Badr was read as heaven’s verdict on the whole enterprise. The next two rounds went otherwise. A year later at Uhud the Meccans came back, and when the archers left the position he had put them on, the Muslim line broke behind them and he was wounded in the face. In 627 a coalition came for Medina itself. On his Persian companion Salman’s advice a trench was dug across the open approach, and it settled the battle almost without a battle, since horsemen cannot charge a ditch. After some weeks of cold and wind the siege fell apart. What followed the siege is the hardest passage in his life, and it is worth saying before anything else that it does not come from his enemies. The Banu Qurayza were a Jewish clan living inside Medina and bound to the town by its defense pact, and while the trench was being held they had negotiated with the besiegers outside. When the coalition withdrew, their strongholds were besieged in turn for twenty-five days until they surrendered. Judgment was handed to Sa’d ibn Mu’adh, a chief of their old allies the Aws, who was himself dying of a wound taken at the trench, and he ruled that the men be killed and the women and children enslaved. Ibn Ishaq says trenches were dug in the market of Medina and puts the number of men killed between six and nine hundred. Muslim writers have defended the ruling as the wartime penalty for treason, applied by the clan’s own chosen arbitrator; a few modern Muslim scholars have questioned how reliable the account is. Two other Jewish clans, the Qaynuqa and the Nadir, had already been expelled from the oasis. A Christian reader should hold two things together here without softening either. The first is that this is the record his own community preserved and did not think shameful, and it is a long way from the Sermon on the Mount. The second is that Christians have no clean hands to wave: the same centuries produced crusaders who sacked Jerusalem, and the difference to argue about is not which side had better men but what each founder taught and did.

(●) 628 to 632 AD: A truce his own men called a humiliation gave him Mecca, and he died four years later without naming a successor. + In 628 he set out for Mecca unarmed, as a pilgrim, and was stopped at a place called Hudaybiyya. The agreement he signed there looked like a defeat: he would go home without visiting the shrine, come back the following year, and return any Meccan who defected to him while Mecca kept anyone who defected the other way. He even let the scribe strike out "the Messenger of God" from the document when the Meccan envoy objected to the title. Umar, never a patient man, asked him openly why they were accepting disgrace. The truce turned out to be the making of the movement: two years of peace let it grow faster than a decade of raiding had. In January 630, after an allied tribe broke the truce, he came to Mecca with an army so large that the town surrendered almost without a fight. He entered, went to the Kaaba, and destroyed the idols in and around it; al-Bukhari’s report has three hundred and sixty of them. What he did with the town is the part his own biographers dwell on. There was an amnesty, and the men who had hunted him for years mostly kept their lives and their property. After that the delegations began arriving in Medina from tribes across Arabia. In March 632 he made the pilgrimage a last time and preached at Arafat to a great crowd, telling them that a Muslim’s life and property were sacred to another Muslim, cancelling the blood feuds and the interest owed from the old days, and charging them to treat their wives well. Three months later, in Medina, he fell ill with fever and headaches, and after several days he died on 8 June 632, in Aisha’s room, and was buried there. He left no instructions anyone agreed on about who should lead next. The argument began the same day, and in time it hardened into the division that runs through Muslim history to this hour: the Sunni majority, who held that the community chose its leaders, and the Shia, who held that leadership belonged to his cousin and son-in-law Ali and to Ali’s descendants after him.

What He Taught

(T1) There is one God, he has no partner and no son, and giving him a partner is the one sin he will not forgive. + Picture the shrine he grew up beside: one building, many idols, a stone for this tribe and a figure for that one, and a town making a living from the arrangement. Religion in Mecca was a portfolio. You spread your devotion the way a careful merchant spreads his risk. Against that he preached tawhid, a word that means making one. God is one, without partner, without offspring, without equal, and nothing else whatever shares in what he is. Its opposite is shirk, association, which means giving God a partner or treating any creature as though it were divine, and the Qur’an says God forgives what he pleases but does not forgive shirk (Qur’an 4:48). The whole of Islam compresses into one sentence a Muslim says to enter it: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God. A Christian reading that first half should feel more agreement than surprise. "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Deuteronomy 6:4) is where the Bible starts too, and Jesus quoted it as the first of all the commandments (Mark 12:29). Of the three denials in the short chapter he gave as his answer (Q), two are ones the church has always made with him: God was not begotten, and nothing is like him. The parting comes at the third. When the Qur’an denies that God begets, it is refusing a physical fathering, and the Nicene Creed refuses that as firmly, saying the Son is "begotten, not made" and eternal with the Father. But the Qur’an also denies the thing the creed is protecting, that the eternal Word who was with God and was God took flesh, and it names the belief itself as unbelief (Qur’an 5:72).

(Q) "Say, ‘He is God alone! God the Eternal! He begets not and is not begotten! Nor is there like unto Him any one!’" + Source: Qur’an 112:1–4, the Chapter of Unity (Palmer translation, 1880). Four short lines that a Muslim child learns early and a Muslim adult recites in prayer all his life. Tradition says it came as the answer when the Meccans asked him to describe the God he was preaching. It is inscribed inside the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, put up in the 690s, where it faces the city where the church confesses the opposite.

(T2) God has sent one message through a long line of prophets, and Muhammad is the last of them. + In the Qur’an’s account of history, no nation was ever left without warning. God sent a messenger to every people, and the message was always the same: worship the one God, do justice, prepare for judgment. Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, David and Jesus are all prophets in Islam, and about twenty-five are named. Muslims hold that the communities who received those messengers lost or altered what was given to them, which is the Islamic explanation for why the Torah and the Gospels do not read as a Muslim would expect. The Qur’an arrives, on this account, to confirm what was true in them and correct what was not. That closing of the line has a title, and the Qur’an gives it to him (Q). Khatam al-nabiyyin is usually rendered "seal of the prophets," and a seal is what you press into wax when a document is finished and nothing more is to be added. Prophecy is closed. Nobody comes after. Christians should recognize the shape of the claim, because they make one like it. "Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son" (Hebrews 1:1–2). Both faiths say God has spoken a final word and that history now waits rather than expects. They differ about what the final word is. For Islam the last thing God sent was a book, delivered through the last of the prophets. For Christians the last thing God sent was his Son, and no book comes after him because no one could outrank him.

(Q) "Mohammed is not the father of any of your men, but the Apostle of God, and the Seal of the Prophets; for God all things doth know!" + Source: Qur’an 33:40, the Chapter of the Confederates (Palmer translation, 1880). The verse sits in the passage dealing with his marriage to Zaynab, the former wife of his adopted son Zayd, and its first clause denies that adoption made Zayd his son in the sense that would have barred the marriage. The second clause became one of the load-bearing sentences of Islam, and every later claimant to prophecy has had to argue his way around it.

(T3) The Qur’an is not his book but God’s own speech, given to him to say aloud. + The word qur’an means recitation, and that is the claim in the title. What he delivered was not his reflection on God, nor his testimony about God, but God’s speech handed to him in Arabic, sentence by sentence, over twenty-three years. He is described in it as ummi, a word most Muslims take to mean unlettered, and that reading matters to them: an unschooled man producing this is the point. Followers memorized the pieces as they came and wrote them on whatever was to hand, and within about twenty years of his death Uthman, the third caliph, which is the title given to the successors who led the community after him, had a single authorized text copied and sent out to the provinces. It is worth being precise about how much stronger this is than the ordinary Christian claim about the Bible. Christians say Luke researched and wrote, Paul dictated letters to real congregations, David sang out of his own trouble, and that God so worked in and through those human authors that what they wrote is his word. Muslims say the Arabic itself is uncreated speech. That is why a translation is called an interpretation and never the Qur’an, why the Arabic is what gets recited in prayer whether or not the worshipper speaks it, and why a printed copy is handled with such care. The Qur’an itself issues the challenge that follows from a claim like that (Q): if you doubt it, produce one chapter like it. Muslim theology calls this i’jaz, inimitability, and treats the book itself as the standing miracle, the way the Gospels treat the resurrection. For a Christian working out where the two faiths really differ, the useful comparison is not book against book. In Islam the Word of God became a book; in Christianity "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). The Muslim parallel to the Bible is closer to what the church says about Christ, and the Muslim parallel to Christ is the Qur’an.

(Q) "And if ye are in doubt of what we have revealed unto our servant, then bring a chapter like it, and call your witnesses other than God if ye tell truth." + Source: Qur’an 2:23, the Chapter of the Heifer (Palmer translation, 1880). Addressed to Meccans who said he was a poet or had been taught by somebody. The dare is literary, and it was aimed at an audience who prized poetry the way other cultures prize music, and who could tell a good line from a bad one in a heartbeat.

(T4) Jesus is a prophet and the Messiah, born of a virgin, and he is neither God’s Son nor crucified. + Most Christians are surprised by how much honor the Qur’an gives Jesus. He is named about twenty-five times, more often than Muhammad. His mother Mary is the only woman named in the whole book, and a chapter carries her name. He is born of a virgin, and the scene of the annunciation is told with real tenderness (Qur’an 19:16–21). He heals the blind and the leper and raises the dead by God’s permission, he is called the Messiah, a word from God and a spirit from him (Qur’an 4:171), and he is alive with God now and will return at the end. Then come the denials, and they fall exactly where the creeds stand. The very verse that calls him a word from God goes straight on to say, "Say not ‘Three,’" and that the Messiah is only an apostle of God (Qur’an 4:171). Another says plainly that those who call God the Messiah do not believe, and has Jesus himself send the children of Israel back to worship "God, my Lord and your Lord" (Qur’an 5:72). And the crucifixion is denied outright, which no other religion outside Christianity has bothered to deny: they did not kill him, a likeness was made for them, and God took him up. The usual explanation among Muslim commentators is that somebody else was made to look like him and died in his place. Notice which direction each side’s charge runs, because the two charges are not the same kind of claim. Islam says Christians took a prophet and made him a god, a charge about motive and drift over time. Christians say a book written six centuries after the event denies the one detail of that event which even hostile ancient sources took for granted, and which the earliest Christian summary of the faith puts first: "that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures" (1 Corinthians 15:3–4). If the cross did not happen, there is nothing left of Christianity to argue about, which is precisely why the denial of the cross is where the conversation between the two faiths always ends up.

(Q) "and for their saying, ‘Verily, we have killed the Messiah, Jesus the son of Mary, the apostle of God,’ . . . but they did not kill him, and they did not crucify him, but a similitude was made for them." + Source: Qur’an 4:157, the Chapter of Women (Palmer translation, 1880). The ellipsis is Palmer’s own, marking where the sentence he is rendering breaks off in the Arabic. The passage is a list of things held against certain of the children of Israel, and their boast of having killed the Messiah is one item on it. The verse continues that those who dispute about him have no knowledge and only follow an opinion, and that God raised him up to himself.

(T5) On the last day the scales are set up, and every person answers for his own deeds. + What will be weighed at the end is a life, and Islam is specific about the shape that life takes. Five duties came to be called the pillars: the confession that there is no god but God and Muhammad is his messenger; prayer five times a day facing Mecca; alms for the poor at a set rate; the fast through the daylight hours of Ramadan; and the pilgrimage to Mecca once in a lifetime for those who can manage it. A rhythm like that shapes a life the way a trellis shapes a vine, and its steadiness is much of what people admire in Muslim devotion. Judgment is pictured as a weighing. The deeds go on the scales, the good against the bad, and the balance decides. Nobody stands in for anybody else: no burdened soul carries another’s burden (Qur’an 53:38), there is no priesthood between a worshipper and God, and there is no sacrifice for sin anywhere in the system. God is merciful, and every chapter of the Qur’an but one opens by saying so, and a devout Muslim genuinely trusts that mercy at the end. What he cannot do is know how the weighing will come out, because mercy on these terms is granted at the last, not settled in advance. This is the quietest of the differences and possibly the deepest. Christianity puts the whole weight of a person’s standing before God on something already finished and outside himself: "For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast" (Ephesians 2:8–9). A Muslim hears in that a license to sin and a slur on God’s justice. A Christian hears in the scales a life spent hoping the arithmetic works out. Neither is misunderstanding the other. They are describing two different ways a guilty person could possibly stand before a holy God, and only one of them can be how it is done.

(Q) "The balance on that day is true, and whosesoever scales are heavy, they are prosperous; but whosesoever scales are light, they it is who lose themselves, for that they did act unjustly by our signs." + Source: Qur’an 7:8–9, the Chapter of Al Aaraf (Palmer translation, 1880). The image is a merchant’s, from a town that lived by weights and measures, and the Qur’an uses it often. "Our signs" are the revelations sent to each people, so what is being weighed is not only conduct but what a person did with the warning he was given.

(Q) "thou wilt find the nearest in love to those who believe to be those who say, ‘We are Christians;’ that is because there are amongst them priests and monks, and because they are not proud." + Source: Qur’an 5:82, the Chapter of the Table (Palmer translation, 1880). He had met Christians before he had power: the monks and traders of the Syrian caravan road, the kingdom across the Red Sea that sheltered his followers in 615, Khadija’s cousin Waraqa who was the first man outside his household to tell him he was a prophet. The verse is not an endorsement of Christian doctrine, which the same chapter rejects (T4). It is a judgment about people, and it is the warmest thing said about any other community in the book. Everything that happened next between the two faiths happened in the shadow of a text that says this.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) The Christian world met him first as a change of government, and named him in writing within a decade of his death. + Nothing in Christian history compares with the speed of what followed. Damascus fell in 634, Jerusalem in 638, Alexandria in 641, Carthage in 698, and in 711 an army crossed into Spain. Take a map of the churches of the year 600 and shade the ones that were under Muslim rule by 750, and you have shaded most of it: Antioch, where believers were first called Christians; Alexandria, the city of Athanasius; Jerusalem itself; and the North African coast that gave the church Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine, whose Hippo lay in what is now Algeria. Christians in those lands were not usually forced to convert. They lived as dhimmi, protected non-Muslims, who kept their worship and their courts and paid a poll tax called the jizya, under restrictions on building, evangelizing and public display that varied a great deal with the ruler. What happened over centuries was slower and more decisive than persecution: attrition. Communities that had produced the creeds shrank into minorities, and some of them are shrinking still. The first Christian mentions of him are early and matter-of-fact. A Syriac chronicle written about 640 records a battle in Palestine, twelve miles east of Gaza, between the Romans and "the Arabs of Muhammad," which is the earliest surviving reference to him by name outside Muslim sources and comes within a decade of his death.

(†) The first serious Christian answers were written from inside the caliphate, and they treated him as a heretic rather than a stranger. + The Christians who answered Islam first were not writing about it from a safe distance. They were living under it, paying its taxes and in some cases working in its offices. John of Damascus, who died around 749, is the great early case. He came from a Christian family that served in the Muslim administration in Damascus, he knew Arabic and knew Muslims, and when he wrote his survey of heresies he gave by far its longest chapter to what he called the heresy of the Ishmaelites. Filing Islam among the heresies rather than the pagan religions was itself a judgment: he saw it as something that had grown up out of Christian and Jewish soil and gone wrong, not as a foreign invention. He knew the Qur’an’s account of Jesus well enough to quote it back, and he pressed the question Christians have pressed ever since: on your own book’s telling, Jesus is God’s word and spirit, so what do you make of that. Not everything he wrote was fair. He passed on the claim that Muhammad had been coached by a heretical monk, which is a polemical story rather than history, and later Christian writers repeated it for a thousand years. Others argued more graciously. In about 781 Timothy I, patriarch of the Church of the East, the great Syriac-speaking church that had always lived beyond the old Roman frontier, held a two-day conversation with the caliph al-Mahdi in Baghdad, and the record of it, written up by Timothy himself, is a model of what such a conversation can be: courteous, direct about the Trinity and the cross, and conducted between men who plainly respected each other. Theodore Abu Qurrah, writing in Arabic in the same period, argued for the Christian faith in the language and the idiom of his Muslim neighbors. This was the first Christian encounter with Islam, and it was carried out by people who had to live next door to the answer.

(†) The Latin West spent centuries inventing him before Peter the Venerable paid to have his book translated. + Western Europe met Islam as an army long before it met Islam as a text, and what it said about the man in the meantime was largely fiction. The chansons de geste, the epic poems sung in medieval France, have Muslims bowing to an idol called Mahound, which is the exact opposite of what he taught, and the crusading centuries did nothing to improve the reporting. The turn came from a Benedictine abbot. Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, traveled to Spain in the 1140s and hired a team of translators, among them Robert of Ketton, to put the Qur’an into Latin. The translation was finished in 1143 and it was the first, and it circulated for four hundred years. Peter’s reason for the project is the memorable part. In the Liber contra sectam Saracenorum, the book against Islam he was still writing when he died in 1156, he told his Muslim readers that he came at them not with arms but with words, not by force but by reason, not in hatred but in love. He set that down with Europe still counting the cost of the Second Crusade, which his contemporary Bernard of Clairvaux had preached. He wanted Christians who argued with Muslims to have actually read the book. What followed was slow. Thomas Aquinas argued in his Summa contra Gentiles that Muhammad offered no miracle and no fulfilled prophecy to support his claim, which is the question a Christian naturally asks and one Muslims answer by pointing to the Qur’an itself. Dante put him in the eighth circle of the Inferno, among the sowers of discord. Not until the modern period did Christians in any number learn Arabic in order to understand rather than to refute, and the best Christian writing on Islam now is the sort that could be handed to a Muslim reader without insult and still leaves the disagreement exactly where it was.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: the Son, the cross, and grace. + The two faiths agree about a great deal. One God, who made the world out of nothing and is not part of it. Prophets who spoke for him. A day of judgment. Angels. Heaven and hell. The dignity of the poor, the duty of alms, the call to submit a whole life rather than an hour a week. A Christian reading the Qur’an finds page after page he can say amen to, and then arrives at the places where amen is not possible. - The Son. The Qur’an denies that God has a son and calls the belief unbelief (Qur’an 5:72). Scripture makes it the hinge of everything: "No one who denies the Son has the Father. Whoever confesses the Son has the Father also" (1 John 2:23). The difference is not a technicality about numbers. It is whether God has shown himself in a face. - The cross. Islam holds that God rescued Jesus from the cross, because it would be beneath God to let his prophet be so treated. Christianity holds that God’s glory is exactly there, that "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8), and that without it nothing is fixed: "if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17). - Grace. The scales weigh what a person has done (T5). The gospel says the account was settled by someone else and is received as a gift, and Paul draws the line himself: "if righteousness were through the law, then Christ died for no purpose" (Galatians 2:21). - The test of a later revelation. Christians do not reject a new claim because it is new. They test it against the one already given, and Paul set the standard before Islam existed: "But even if we or an angel from heaven should preach to you a gospel contrary to the one we preached to you, let him be accursed" (Galatians 1:8). A revelation that removes the cross is not an addition to the gospel. It is a different message. None of that is a reason to be rude to a Muslim neighbor, and the Qur’an’s own compliment to Christians who are not proud (Q) is worth returning in kind. But the disagreement is real, it is about the most important thing there is, and pretending otherwise serves nobody. Muhammad taught that God is too great to have a Son and too just to let a prophet die on a cross. The gospel answers that God was great enough to become one of us, and just enough to bear himself what we owed.