The Abrahamic Faiths

"O Muhammad, you seem to think that we are your people. Do not deceive yourself because you have encountered a people who have no knowledge of war and got the better of them; for my God if we fight you, you will find that we are real men!" Jews of Medina responding to the Prophet's demands they surrender to Islam and forfeit their allegiance to Judaism's successor-religion.

That uneasy, often bludgeoned-bloody relationship has never changed over the millennia. There were interregnums when a particular ruler would look kindly upon those other two religions that fell under the rubric of 'the Abrahamic faiths' (a very particular conceit of Islam; the acknowledgement that Abraham represents the initiator and nexus), viewed as inferior but acceptable with certain taxation provisos. And there were times when synagogues and churches, predecessors of mosques and Islam, were destroyed, their adherents hounded.

Islam likes matters of human existence and God's place within that existence neat and tidy, orderly and predictable. The itinerary as laid out in prescriptive Islam is for obedience and obeisance, the order of observance negotiable, but the observance strictly non-negotiable. Surrender is complete. The lives of the faithful completely circumscribed by utter allegiance to Allah, and undying devotion to Islam. And honour unstinting and eternal to the Prophet Muhammad, (blessed be his name).

Islam does not accept any manner of opposition to its celestially pre-eminent place in the hierarchy of Great Spirit manifestations and beliefs, all others being non-credible impostors, with Islam alone the sole path to God's affections and protections. Islam functions for its vast army of the faithful ummah as a complete lifestyle template, one that permits no deviance from its rigid prescription. Pray five times each day to the place where rests the spirit of Allah.

Wander from the rigidity of total surrender to exalted prescripts and one risks being named an apostate. And never to dissemble, to avow equality between peoples and their other-but-endowed beliefs lest one be outcast and vulnerable to the penalty of death. For Muhammad preached that the one God al-Llah (Allah) was the true God, the creator of all that exists, the arbiter of justice and mercy before whom every living human must prostrate themselves.

Abraham, the prophet of monotheism, and the father of Judaism, just happens also to be the father of Islam, so saith the Prophet Muhammad. Moses, the deliverer of the Jews in slave-bondage to Egypt, is also recognized as a celebrated foundational figure for Islam. Jews face Jerusalem in their ritual prayers to the Almighty, and Muslims face Mecca when they worship Allah. The rituals that originated in Judaism, like dietary laws, circumcision, charity, community, also handily adapted to Islam. (A religion-in-a-box!)

"Jews who follow us shall be given aid and equality; they shall not be oppressed, nor shall aid be given to others against them", but that generosity of vision and spirit was unrequited and summarily rejected by Jews, who preferred to remain faithful to their own precepts, their own vision of the Almighty, their own customs and traditions.

"If the Jews are called upon by the Believers to make peace, they must comply; and if the Believers are called upon by the Jews to make peace, they must agree, except in the case of a holy war."

And holy war it has been evermore. Jews blasphemed intolerably by preferring their own heritage, traditions, customs, and Yahweh as opposed to Allah. Their unreasonableness brought down the wrath of Muhammad upon them, and that tradition too has followed history into the future as Jews fell into divine disfavour resulting from their disobedience to Islam. "Thus they incurred wrath upon wrath..."; the stage set in stony finality.

The three-pronged religious, social, ideological dysfunctionality - between a rigidly unenlightened Islam cleaving to its roots as a desert-Bedouin religion for warring tribes whose history is replete with bloody battles, territorial expansion, ideological imperatives and rival assassinations, and Christianity and Judaism which both have attempted to leverage themselves into modernity while retaining custom and tradition - is ongoing.

The faiths claim to worship a single God - that omniscient, omnipresent spirit whose greatness and goodness benefits all of humanity. The malevolently blood-stained pages of history attest otherwise; that He looks down impassively on the misinterpretations of the messages given to humankind resulting in an ongoing cycle of brutal dysfunction. Yet the religions of Christianity and Judaism have devolved and evolved and live side by side in peace.

While that of Islam remains mired in the traditions of its introduction by the Prophet Muhammad whose instruction and war-mongering in the interests of absorbing humankind under the generous and demanding mantle of Islam remains unchanged; medieval in concept, outlook and presence. Challenging the non-Muslim world in bellicose threats through those among its followers who have studiously absorbed the history of inception and the tradition of conquest.

From jihad to jihad. On to the finality of the universal caliphate. For that is the nature and the purpose of Islam.