Responses, thoughts, and a question...

I would like to respond to and build upon both Ami’s and Nicole’s posts about the continuity of global religious traditions and the similarity of the Islamic Qur’an to the sacred texts of the two prominent western religions: Christianity and Judaism.

Ami comments that the Qur’an seems to be largely a continuation of earlier western sacred texts, or at the very least, it acknowledges Muhammad as just one prophet (albeit the last one) in a long chain of prophets stretching all the way back to Adam. This is certainly the case, and as such, it comes as little surprise that there are numerous parallels between Christianity and Islam. For example, both religions pose and attempt to answer the question of “what will be the value at the end of human life? (Sells 16)” Every lesson, tradition, ritual, and guideline – the very essence of every religion – follows from this question. It is simply a never-ending quest to assign meaning and value to human life; life that has no intrinsic value. Both Chrisitanity and Islam provide a framework, and a very similar framework at that, to answering this fundamental question.

Where the religions differ, though, is in their presentations of their respective prophets – Muhammed and Jesus – and their relation to God and the sacred texts of each religion. As Sells writes, “If there is any analogue to Christ in Islam, as the “word of God” and the guide to the just life, it is not Muhammad but the Qur’an itself (Sells 4)”. But such a difference is largely superficial. The ideas of each religion – the ideas of how one should conduct oneself – are virtually identical. Not only is the how identical, the answer to the why question is very similar: Why should one strive to live well? Why should one express a “continual conern for social justice” or “a continual willingness to give a share of one’s possessions to the less fortunate (Sells 17)”? The answer lies in the idea of a Day of Reckoning or a Last Judgment. If there will come a time where your very worth as a human being will be assessed, and your eternal destiny will be determined accordingly, than you certainly have an incentive to act in compliance to the very texts (the Qur’an and the Bible) that posit the idea of a “moment of truth”.

So, to conclude, the differences I have noticed thus far between Islam and Christianity seem to be somewhat superfluous. I do have a question, however, that I would like to hear everyone’s thoughts on. Sell points out that “for Westerners who do not read or speak Arabic, the effort to get even a basic glimpse of what the Qur’an is about has proved frustrating (3)”. Why is this not (or is it?) the case with biblical texts? Were the biblical texts not written in Greek, Aramaic, Hebrew, or some combination of languages other than English? Yet, we rarely hear discussions about what may be lost in translation. Not quite sure why this is. Thoughts?