Comment by unanswered | Hacker News Reader

Comment by unanswered | Hacker News Reader

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Perhaps this is straying a bit far from the topic at hand, but is it really true that you'd be hard pressed to find a Muslim scholar who considers the worship of Jesus Christ as God to be tantamount to the worship of a false god? I really don't know one way or the other, but I find this a bit hard to believe. I understand one might try to rescue the position by pointing out that those worshippers of Christ do so while explicitly identifying Him as one with the God of Abraham. However, I also vaguely recall an episode in the Torah where the Israelites decide to worship an idol as a substitute for God (wait, wasn't this why Moses destroyed the tablets containing the ten commandments?), and it seems to me an obvious parallel for one who believes Christ to be a mere prophet.

To come full circle, this almost lends credence to the belief called out (as false) in the article, that the Muslims worship Mohammed; because it seems as though the line between the worship of Allah and the worship of his prophets is somewhat blurred. But presumably this does not at all follow the lines of actual contemporary Muslim theology :).

Sorry, I was focusing too much on the point I was trying to make that I might have not worded it correctly. No mainstream Muslim scholar would accept the trinity, or even the divinity of Jesus Christ; but the continuity of monotheistic worship and the identity of the entity being worshipped would crucially be viewed as unchanged (though worshipped in a way that they would undeniably find wrong).

Outside of the sliver of people that research religion that remain religious, I absolutely know many religious people who have no concept of the relationship between other religions and how they would have the same deity involved. From my experience this would be most people, I don't know what your experience is nor do I have a quantitive study on this. I have talked to many people that would find this entire conversation alien and also offensive, just from their own lack of exposure. Even the idea of verifying this or merely opening the holy books to see that many of the chapters and stories are the same would be sacrilegious to them.

I definitely think that’s true of most people that unquestioningly follow what they’ve been raised/told, regardless of what it is they actually believe (and not just when it comes to religion).

> Outside of the sliver of people that research religion that remain religious...

I come from the rural area of a developing Muslim country (Bangladesh), most people around me didn't have much secular or religious education, and yet I think absolutely everyone around me knew Islam is a continuation of Christianity.

The idea is that current generation of Christians have lost their way (and one of their greatest sins is worshipping Jesus), that's why God had to reveal Islam, but the "true Christians" of past were righteous and worshipped the same God as ours.

I think you're not aware of how big a deal is shirk- the idea of attributing God-like power to humans- is in (Sunni-) Islam.

I’m not aware, this is really interesting to me

I think it would be more prudent to look at the context in Muhammad's times. Muhammad often preached of Jews and Christians as also being brethren, as fellow "People of the Book". But it is also to be noted that Muhammad, during his travels to Damascus, was only exposed to the Orthodox flavor of Christianity in the ERE - which itself was just going through a phase of staunch iconoclasm. The later adoption and proliferation of icons in the ERE seems to be a response to Muslim rulers issuing coins with their names and phrases of the Quran. But it would be expected that in Muhammad's time, he would have seen a lot of similarity between (Byzantine) Christians and Muslims. If he had been on a trip to the WRE, he might have likely had a very different take on Christianity, albeit one in more staunch opposition.

Interesting take. Note that the Council of Chalcedon took place in 451 AD, or around a hundred and twenty years before Muhammad was born so the divergent views between the orthodox everyone else would have definitely been canonical by then, lending credence to that possibility. But note that Islam’s view on the nature of Jesus (a prophet but not a god) is probably easier to reconcile with the Chalcedonian view that separates between his purported divine and mortal existences to a greater extent than orthodox miaphysitism (which tends to blur the lines somewhat) does, at least as I understand it.

I would actually speculate that apart from the above iconoclastic view of Jesus from the orthodox belief, perhaps Judaism had a greater influence on Islam, and Islam's general view on the non-godliness of man. Islam and Judaism share almost similar prayer times, similar prayer styles, extremely parallel belief systems, etc due to the proximity of Jews in Arabia (Medina [Yathrib] was a largely Jewish city pre-Islam). But while Judaism chose to reject Jesus as even a prophet outright, Islam sought to reconcile the view by keeping him a prophet, perhaps because the Roman Empire under Heraclius was still very dominant.

It is important to note that Islam was created as a very administrative religion rather than a philosophical one, partly because Muhammad wanted to see it being adopted in 3 key regions. He sent emissaries to Heraclius the Elder (at Constantinople), who briefly considered the proposal, to the Patriarch of the Copts (at Alexandria), who amicably received it, preserved it (till today) and sent back his own friendly missive of rejection [1], and to Khusrau of the Sassanid Empire, who tore up the letter. So I doubt that Muhammad actually gave much effort to philosophical aspects such as Jesus or Ahura Mazda, and simply chose to borrow the history from nearby religions while reconciling them with the core that is Islamic monotheism. In fact, Muslims actually have four books they consider holy - the Torah, the Zabur (Psalms), the Injeel (Gospel of Christ) and the Quran (Revelations to Muhammad).

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Muqawqis

I wonder how strong the "family only, no entry by conversion" element of Judaism was at the time/place. If we consider Muhammad a person acting on human motivation (instead of divine instruction, a somewhat divisive approach considering how insistence on the latter appears to be the strongest theological moat of Islam), it could well be that Christianity was only referenced as a gateway, as a precedence for a form of Judaism that welcomed people not born Jewish, but that the goal wasn't at all Christianity (from far away), but an opened up version of the local Judaism.

> it could well be that Christianity was only referenced as a gateway, as a precedence for a form of Judaism that welcomed people not born Jewish, but that the goal wasn't at all Christianity (from far away), but an opened up version of the local Judaism.

Apart from the human motivation element, you're getting there as to what the Islamic view is. The Quran does talk of Jews as the chosen people of God whom he will gather back in Israel, but also mentions that their misfortune (at being thinly spread out and not collected in their homeland) is because of divine punishment for their waywardliness (which the Quran does not cease to stress upon a lot). Islam is considered to be Judaism v2 and out of closed beta, within the Quranic text itself. Obviously some of the strongly worded verses calling Jews misguided heretics is misinterpreted and largely the "divine proof" for a lot of animosity from the Muslim community towards Jews in general. The influence of Jews on Islam cannot be underestimated. Some Jewish kings, apart from the usual prophets in Islam, such as Shamir Yuharish of Himyar (modern Yemen) are still fairly popular in the Arabian peninsula among Arabic Muslims. In fact, we had to learn about them as expat students in an Arabic country as part of the regional history lessons.

The doctrine of the trinity certainly looks like it flirts with polytheism if you're coming at it from a traditional Jewish or Islamic perspective.

It is congruent to recognize it as a single consciousness with autonomous parts.

But ultimately people are more allergic to the word polytheism as they'll spend more energy interpreting why it isn't because it is crucial to their identity. Basically "only false idols are polytheistic", groups of people that were punished specifically for worshipping and exalting multiple deities. So although there are three supreme supernatural beings that all have to be pleased in different ways, the word polytheism would cause a greater reaction than simply brushing off how the venn diagram between polytheism and the trinity is a circle.

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