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In the past several years, three expressions have entered the media when it comes to talking about religion. Every time, it is a question of three things: ‘the three monotheisms’; ‘the three religions of Abraham’; ‘the three religions of the book’. It is difficult to come across an organ of the press or to pick up a newspaper (be it religious or secular) without having one or another of these formulations put forth as self-evident. At a higher level, books that have one of them as titles, or which contain them (some of which are of high quality), have multiplied since the 1980s.1
It would be interesting to study the history of these expressions—something I have not had the courage to do. I would be tempted to venture, in lieu of an inventory, that the genealogy of these expressions could very well go back to the Middle Ages; and, more exactly, that the idea of associating Judaism, Christianity, and Islam comes from a desire to condemn them all rather than embracing them in a common sympathy! In this way, what are called today ‘the three religions’ would simply be the latest version of what was applied long ago to ‘the three impostors’, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, deemed to have deceived humanity.
In any event, one can believe that these expressions were more recently conceived, and continue to be used, out of noble motives. These would indicate a point in common for the religions in question, eventually some common ground in practice.
My immediate purpose is to show that these three expressions are at once false and dangerous. They are false because each masks a serious error concerning the nature of the three religions that one claims to bring together under a common roof. They are dangerous because they encourage an intellectual sloth that relieves one of closely examining reality. I will examine them in order, starting with the idea of ‘monotheism’.
The term ‘monotheism’ comes from outside, not within, religions. The ‘monotheisms’ do not speak of themselves this way. To be sure, certain expressions they use allow themselves to be translated in this way, such as the Arab tawḥīd, ‘affirmation that God is one’—a word that, by extension, took on a meaning close to ‘theology’. Speaking very precisely, among some Jews there is a characterization of Judaism as ‘ethical monotheism’, a phrase that, perhaps, is attributable to the German rabbi Leo Baeck (1873–1956).
The term ‘monotheism’ was born rather late, in the seventeenth century, from the pen of Henry More, one of the Christian Platonists of Cambridge, who used it in English in 1660 (see the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘monotheism’). Its subsequent career saw it occur much more among the philosophers than the theologians, and almost never was it used as an expression of piety by simple believers.
Let us begin with a synthetic statement: monotheism—and, moreover, polytheism—has nothing specifically religious in its meaning; it primarily comes from philosophy.
There are non-monotheistic religions that exist. But, conversely, there are non-religious monotheisms, in which one finds a philosophical affirmation of a God who is not the object of a religion. This is the case with the deism of certain Enlightenment thinkers. Here, though, we can always ask if this does not involve a certain weakened version of Christianity, in which only an answer to the question of the number of gods was retained. The best examples, therefore, should be sought among the Greek philosophers who never heard of Judaism and, even less, of Christianity. Thus, the pre-Socratic Xenophanes of Colophon (who lived in the sixth to fifth century before Christ) opposed to the various imaginings of the nations, each of whom represented the deity in their image, ‘a sole god, the greatest among the gods and men, who resembles mortals neither in appearance nor in thought’ (fragment 21 B 23, ed. Diels and Kranz). After him, Aristotle called the unchanging first mover of his natural philosophy by the name of ‘god’. It appears that this god knows nothing outside of itself (Metaphysics 12.7, 1072b25, 29–30).
In contrast, Epicurus admitted the existence of several gods. They live in the interstices separating the innumerable worlds postulated by his cosmology. They enjoyed a perfect beatitude and took no thought, and had no concern, for those worlds and their inhabitants (Brague 1999: 54–5). The philosopher publicly acknowledged the gods of the city and rendered them appropriate worship, but did not consider them to be true gods.
The affirmation of a sole God is therefore not necessarily a religious phenomenon. One can have a God without religion. Conversely, one can have a religion without God, as was the case with primitive Buddhism.
When one says ‘the three monotheisms’, the use of the definite article assumes that there are only three. However, these purported ‘three monotheisms’ were not the first. The first was, perhaps, the invention of the Pharaoh Amenophis IV, who took the name Akhnaton (1250 bce). The underlying idea is that a sole God is the true one, the others only being subordinate delegates. In its case, Israel began with a national God, to whom alone worship should be given, but the other gods were the legitimate gods of the neighbouring nations. It was only after the return from exile that the idea emerged that there is but one God, the other gods being false, that is, ‘idols’ (Isa. 44: 8; 47: 21).
These ‘three monotheisms’ were also not the last. Religious fecundity did not dry up, especially among the colonized peoples of the Third World (Voodoo and Pentecostalism among African blacks) or who had had contact with the West (the Cargo cult in New Guinea). In contrast, almost no one invented new polytheisms. Religions emerge most often from a pre-existing religion that they claim to reform. And these ‘maternal’ religions are monotheistic. Thus, in the nineteenth century religions such as Mormonism were born from Christianity and the Bahai religion from Islam. The religion of the Sikhs, born in the seventeenth century from Hinduism, borrowed monotheism from Islam.
The new religions of today understand themselves as adjuncts to pre-existing religions, for example, Kimbanguism, born in the 1930s in the Republic of Congo (then the Belgian Congo) from the preaching of Simon Kimbangu, which succeeded in being admitted into the ecumenical Council of Churches. This is rare, since the older religions most often find it hard to admit that the new religions can claim to represent a legitimate version of themselves. Thus, Judaism does not accept Christianity, Christianity does not accept Islam, and the latter in turn does not accept Bahaism.
The real question is not the quantity of gods. It is never a matter of merely determining their number by counting. In fact, one can wonder if a veritable polytheism has ever existed outside of the polemics of those who attack it. Aristotle (Metaphysics 5.6, 1016b31–5) distinguishes different sorts of unity or, more concretely, different cases when one says ‘it is the same thing’. He therefore distinguishes unity by number (the same thing, which ‘does not constitute number’), by species (you and I are members of the human race), by genus (my dog and I are living beings), and by analogy (scales and feathers are the same thing, because scales are to fish what feathers are to birds). One can say that every religion attributes to the divine one or another of these different levels of unity. The divine can present itself as an individual, a family, a teeming race, a level of being. In each case, though, it is distinguished from what it is not, i.e. the ‘profane’, by characteristics that constitute it as a unity. As a consequence, the proper question is to ask what the monotheism makes of plurality, and what the polytheism makes of unity.2
Ancient paganism knew the idea of a ‘world’ of the divine, a pantheon that made all the gods members of a single, and unique, collectivity. This is what Homer said so magnificently: ‘The gods are not unknown to one another, even if they live in separate dwellings’ (Odyssey 5.79–80). And above the family of the Olympians hovered Destiny (Moira), which regulated the succession of the generations constituting the family. Fathers were dethroned in favour of their sons. Perhaps it was this impersonal power that, for the Greeks, was the veritable cause of the unity of the divine.
The real question, therefore, is to ask how God is one, what is the mode of unity that relates the divine to itself. Here I will simply sketch a point that I will develop below. ‘To be one’: that can mean to affirm that God is unique. There is only one. The set ‘gods’ only contains one member. Here, however, one encounters a paradox that arises from rather simple logic. Unity, like every number, is not the property of the thing, but of the class to which it belongs. To say that God is one, is to suppose that he belongs to a higher class, that of ‘unities’. Thus, while one thinks that by affirming God’s unity one is making him something supreme, in reality one is devaluing him, because he is subordinated to the class of unities.
This is why religions do not content themselves with affirming that God only exists as a single exemplar (his ‘uniqueness’). They also say something about the way in which he is one with himself (his ‘unity’).
God can be one by way of continuity with himself, because he is, as it were, of a single piece. The Quran offers a representation of this sort when, in a famous sura which was often invoked against the Christian idea of the Trinity, it calls God ‘the Impenetrable’ (aṣ-ṣamad) (112: 2). Even the most ancient commentators did not understand the meaning of the adjective, and they had to venture conjectures. They sometimes explained that God is wholly continuous or homogeneous, without imperfection, without defect, like a piece of forged metal (Gimaret 1988: 320–3).
God can be one by way of fidelity to himself in the context of a design of salvation being worked out in history. This, perhaps, is what is expressed by the famous formula in the Book of Exodus by which the God of Israel presented himself to Moses, calling himself ‘I will be He whom I will be’ (Exod. 3: 14).
God can be one by way of the total accord, in love, of the three hypostases of the divine substance. For Christianity, the Trinity is not a way of attenuating the rigour of monotheism. To the contrary, it is a way of thinking to a conclusion how God is one. If ‘God is love’ (1 John 4: 16), it is love that must constitute the internal law of his being, and thus of his unity with himself (as I said, I will develop these thoughts later in the work).
I do not like it therefore when, as often happens, it is said (whether to credit or discredit them makes no difference) that Islam or Judaism profess a ‘strict monotheism’. This is as though there could be ‘less strict’ monotheisms, Christianity, for example. It is enough simply to try to imagine what a relaxed monotheism—one that is accommodating, easy-going—to see the absurdity of this sort of formulation. God is not more or less one…The difference is not in the harder or softer character of the monotheism, but in the way in which the unity is conceived.
It was not Islam that discovered the unique God, ‘The-God’, Allah. He was already known to the Arabs. ‘If you ask them: “Who created heaven and earth, who subjected the sun and the moon?”, they answer: “God!”…’ (Q. 29: 61, 31: 25, 39: 38; cf. 43: 9 (‘the Powerful, the Knowing’); 43: 87 (‘…who created them…’)). The Allah before Muhammad was, perhaps, what the historians of religion call an ‘idle god’ (deus otiosus). Such a God creates the world, then retires, letting lesser divinities administer the created order and share the prayers and sacrifices of men. Islam, therefore, would be a sort of short-circuit, passing by the divinities tasked with interceding, in order to arrive directly at the creator God.
We however are not very clear about the religion of the Arabs at the time of Muhammad. The traditional history supposes that they, in the main, were pagans, polytheists therefore, with a few Christian tribes, some Jewish ones, and a small number of isolated individuals given the mysterious name of ḥanīf, we could say: monotheists without any particular denomination. Arab historians have collected the data pertaining to the idols worshipped in ancient Araby.3 It seems, however, that they attributed to the epoch of Muhammad a religious situation that had already disappeared for several centuries, and that the Araby of the time was much more Christianized than was generally thought. The Quran speaks often of the ‘associators’ (mushrikūn), those who associate one, or several other beings, with the unique God. And it does so in rather harsh terms. Who were they, though? Pagans? Or rather Christians, adherents of Trinitarian doctrine as it had been interpreted by those who rejected the dogma defined at the Council of Nicaea concerning Christ, that he is ‘of one substance with the Father’? Some have thought so, with arguments that do not lack in value (Hawting 1999; Gallez 2005).
It is at least paradoxical to see monotheism as an element common to the three religions, since it historically functioned as a golden apple, that is, an apple of discord. In fact, these three religions only recognize the others as monotheistic with great difficulty.
Christianity does recognize the monotheism of Judaism. Judaism finds it harder to return the favour. Employing a phrase from the Quran (5: 73), Maimonides reproached Christians with making God ‘the third of three’.4 It was not until the Rabbi of Perpignan Menaḥem ha-Meiri (d. 1315) that the dominant opinion (although not unanimous) became that Christians are not ‘idolators’.5
Judaism recognized the monotheism of Muslims, once the misunderstanding was cleared up concerning the worship offered to the Kaʿba.6 Islam would without difficulty recognize the monotheism of Jews, if the Quran did not reproach them for associating a mysterious personage named ʿUzayr (9: 30) with God. Perhaps this is the Esdras of the Bible, unless it is the garbled name of an angel.
Christianity today considers the monotheistic character of Islam to be obvious. It was not always thus, however. John of Damascus, one of the first Christians to write on the religion of the ‘Ismaelites’, turns the charge that Christians adore the cross to the countercharge of worshipping the Black Rock of Kaʿba. And the popular literature of the Middle Ages saw Muslims as pagans, adoring Muhammad and two other idols!7 For their part, many Muslims admit that Christians are not polytheists. But what to make of the formulas in the Quran which formally accuse them of associating ‘monks’, or even Jesus and his Mother, with God (9: 31; 5: 116)?
Thus, to speak of the religions as ‘monotheistic’ does not get us very far in understanding them. One still has to ask, what model of divine unity is at work, and what are the consequences of the application of the model? In other words, what is the meaning of this-or-that affirmation of divine unity?
By the phrases ‘the three religions of Abraham’ or ‘the three Abrahamic religions’, people believe they establish common ground, by appealing to a common ancestor. In truth, however, this is another golden apple.
All three, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, have books in which the name of a person named Abraham appears. (The Arabic of the Quran writes with a slight variation: Ibrahīm. This, perhaps, is due to a later incorrect reading of an obsolete form of writing (Luxenberg 2004: 102–3).) Abraham, however, is not the only biblical personage whose name is common to all the religions. This is also the case for Adam, Noah, Joseph, Moses, and Jonah, who appear in the Old and New Testament as well as the Quran. In its turn, the Quran knows Jesus and his mother, the Virgin Mary, while the foundational writings of Judaism obviously do not mention them.
Islam, though, gives to the one that Christians name Jesus a very different name than the one by which he was known to the Jews (Yeshu), as well as by Christian Arabs (Yeshūʿ). The Quran calls him ʿĪsā, a name that recalls in a surprising way that of Esau (ʿĪsū). In this, should one see the trace of an implicit comparison of the three religions? That of the Jews coming from Jacob (Israel), the Arabs from Ishmael, and Christians from Esau? It is well known that Jewish texts often identified Christians in a symbolic way with Esau.
At a more general level a problem arises, that of the presence in the three religions of literary figures bearing the same name. Simply because the names are the same does not mean that the personages are. Their personal traits are embedded and revealed in the particular narratives of the different writings. And what is recounted in the holy books of the three religions with respect to these figures is not uniform, far from it. The history of Joseph is the only one that the Quran recounts in an integral, orderly way, in sura 12, entitled ‘Joseph’ (Yūsuf). It reprises the grand features of the biblical account (Gen. 37–50), and adds some details drawn from the Jewish legends found in the midrash (de Prémare 1989). The same thing can be said, grosso modo, of the figure of Moses.
Moreover, the meaning of the biblical figures does not solely depend upon these individual narratives looked at in isolation. It also depends in large part upon the connections among them which shed reciprocal light. The meaning of the figure of Mary in Christianity is hardly conceivable without the ‘typological’ connection between her and Eve, which is not found in Islam (Gisel 2006: 134).
But it is with respect to Jesus that the Quran and the New Testament most differ. The miracles reported in the Quran are healings, which are not specified. The Quran adds spectacular miracles, in which the embellishing of the apocryphal Gospels makes itself seen: Jesus speaking as an infant, or creating birds of bronze, animating them, then destroying them (3: 49; 5: 110). Jesus’ teaching is not reported. Finally, Jesus was not crucified by the Jews, it only ‘seemed to them’ (shubbiha lahum) that he had been (4: 157). Taken up to heaven, he had not died and therefore did not need to be resurrected.
As for the figure of Abraham, it is rather a source of disagreement than of concord. In truth, for Judaism and for Christianity, Islam is not Abrahamic. It is not in its conception of prophecy, nor in its conception of history. Jesus, the Twelve, Paul, and the first Christians were all Jews. They thus linked themselves to an Abrahamic genealogy that no one contested. The problem only surfaced when Paul had believers of Gentile origin admitted into the Christian community. He justified this enlargement by interpreting the story of the two sons of Abraham, the son of the slave Agar and the son of Sarah, the free woman, with the first representing ‘the flesh’, the second ‘the spirit’ (Gal. 4: 21–31).
Muhammad and the first Muslims were not of Jewish stock and did not live in the Holy Land. They, therefore, had to attach themselves to the biblical history by inventing a genealogy. They constructed one by also representing the history of two of Abraham’s sons. In the Bible, Ishmael was the ancestor of the desert nomads (Gen. 16: 12). One only had to see in them the Arabs for the equation to be made. It does not appear that the idea of connecting themselves to Ishmael came to the Arabs before Muhammad. No previous genealogy of biblical inspiration existed before the Islamic enterprise (Dagorn 1981).
The history of Abraham is not interpreted in the same way in Judaism and in Christianity. Both underscore the extraordinary faith of the patriarch, who was ready to sacrifice the son that God had promised him. Judaism prefers to put the accent upon the non-sacrifice of Isaac. In fact, it does not talk about the sacrifice of the son, but his ‘binding’ (ʿaqedah), with the child having been bound, as one did with the animals of the Temple. The central event is God’s intervention, as He restrains the hand of Abraham and substitutes a goat for the human victim. Christianity adds to the example of Abraham’s faith an allegorical reading of his sacrifice as a prefiguration of the cross of Christ. Everything is turned upside down: it is God himself who sacrifices his beloved Son. The situation of Islam is more complex. The Quran leaves vague the identity of the son who was to be sacrificed. Was it to have been Isaac, as in the Bible? Or Ishmael?
Moreover, the Quran places Abraham in a series of prophets who would have received a book, projecting backwards the model of Muhammad. Abraham is therefore deemed to have received, like Moses, pages or ‘leaves’ (Q. 53: 37; 87: 19; see 20: 133), which neither the Old nor the New Testament mentions. Above all, the Quran makes use of the figure of Abraham to recount a history that neither Judaism nor Christianity knows anything about, and for good reason: that of the foundation of a house by the patriarch (Q. 2: 125–7). The word (bayt) can mean ‘temple’, and the purpose of the edifice clearly shows that this is the case: one had to bow and prostrate oneself therein (Q. 22: 26). The Quran does not say anything about the particular location of this building, but the subsequent Islamic tradition placed it in the ‘sterile valley’, that of Mecca, and saw in the house, the cubic temple of the Kaʿba. This furnished the pilgrimage to them with a legitimacy that went back to the oldest antiquity.
In the West, one has the habit of speaking of the ‘religions of Abraham’ in the plural. This, above all, is a Christian locution. For Islam there is only one ‘religion of Abraham’, which is Islam itself. For the Christian, to speak of the ‘religion of Abraham’ is to include Judaism and Islam, and to associate them with Christianity in a vague sort of fraternity. For Islam, on the other hand, it means to exclude Judaism and Christianity: ‘Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian, but a true believer (ḥanīf) and Muslim (muslim), and he was not one of the polytheists (mushrik)’ (Q. 3: 67).8 This exclusion operates by a series of retrenchments. The operation is already found in the Quran: ‘They have said: “Be Jews or Christians, you will be well advised”. Say: “But no!…Follow the religion of Abraham, a true believer who was not numbered among the polytheists”’ (2: 135). For the Muslim religion, Islam already was the religion of Abraham. This religion of Abraham, anterior to Judaism as well as Christianity, was moreover already that of Moses, Noah, and even Adam, as it was later the religion of Jesus. It was the religion of all of the humanity which was to come from the loins of Adam. This was a humanity which even before the creation of the world, miraculously drawn from its first ancestor, confessed the lordship of God, in a scene described in the Quran (7: 72).
What, then, is the status of the two other religions, apparently chronologically anterior to the religion preached by Muhammad? The main current of Islam sees in them deformations, betrayals of the message originally addressed to Abraham. This derives logically from the fundamental teaching of the deformation (taḥrīf) of the previous scriptures.9 It is derived from the interpretation of the verses of the Quran: ‘certain Jews altered [the meaning] of the [revealed] words’ (4: 46 and 5: 13; 5: 41; 2: 75). The meaning of these quranic verses is not totally clear, but the passages most often were interpreted as signifying that the sacred texts were tampered with. The common view is the following: the Jews imagine that they have in their hands the Torah revealed to Moses, the Christians believe they possess ‘the Gospel’ (in the singular) which was revealed to the prophet Jesus. But the two books, the Torah and the Gospel, were corrupted, the first by the Jews, the second by the Christians, which deprives both of the genuineness they claim. Those guilty for these deformations are sometimes identified: Esdras for the Torah, St Paul for the Gospel. Happily, the authentic content of the revelations made to Moses and to Jesus was preserved, precisely in the Quran.
Thanks to its invocation of Abraham, Islam effects a paradoxical operation according to which, on one hand, it is the last of the religions, on the other, the first of all of them.
Thus, the ‘Abraham’ that the three religions would have in common is a vague abstraction. This smallest of common denominators coincides with none of the concrete figures revered by them and in which they recognize themselves. To accept such an Abraham would be for each religion to renounce a dimension of its faith.
Among Christians and Jews, but also among certain Muslims, one speaks of ‘three religions of the book’. The expression is deceptive. First of all, because it already has a meaning in one of the religions, Islam. Islamic law has the concept of ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitāb). In the Islamic city, there is no place for pagans, who, in principle, only have the choice between conversion and death. In contrast, the members of the religions that already had a sacred text when Muhammad came on the scene, i.e. Judaism and Christianity, as well as Zoroastrianism, do have a juridically defined place by rules that fix the rights and duties of the ‘protected’ communities (ahl al-dhimma). Islam, however, clearly does not consider itself as being a part of these ‘peoples of the book’.
The second defect of this expression is its imprecision. Does a ‘religion of the book’ signify a religion in which there is found a sacred book or books? In this sense, every religion coming from a people that knows writing has one or several written texts. These can be narratives, what are called myths, legends concerning the god or the gods of this religion. They can equally be instruments of worship, for example, collections of hymns, of religious songs. They can also be cultic ‘recipes’, as it were, concerning the art and manner of sacrifice, of how to offer gifts to the divinity. One can find in them rules of conduct, of morality, counsels concerning how to please the divinity. Finally, one can find collections of the teachings of the founder of the religion.
It is fitting, therefore, not to identify the religions of a book with the three religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Moreover, a religion in which there is a book is not, by that fact, a ‘religion of the book’. And finally, even if one limits oneself to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, one has to make distinctions because, as we will see, the relation of each of these religions to its own book is not the same in each case.
This is explained, first of all, by the difference in the nature of these three books. They were redacted according to different rhythms, accelerating as one progressed. The period of redaction for the Old Testament was approximately eight centuries, for the New Testament about seventy years, for the Quran, about twenty years. Moreover, they were not composed with the same aim in mind. The texts brought together in the Old and New Testaments, composed by different authors, in different contexts, and for different reasons, only formed a sacred book once they were assembled and deemed canonical. In contrast, the Quran seems to have been composed in order to serve as the sacred book of a community. It situates itself in this way in a series of works that probably began in the third century ce, with the book of Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, and which continued as late as the nineteenth century with the book of the Bahais, the Book of Mormon, and many others.10
The Old Testament is less a book than a library, a collection of books that belong to all the literary genres. There you find history, whether actual or mythic, legislation, poetry, including erotic poetry such as the Song of Songs, quasi-philosophic writing, e.g. Ecclesiastes, prophetic exhortations, and the so-called ‘Wisdom’ literature. Its oldest texts probably date back to 1200 bce, while the most recent differ somewhat between Jews and Christians. The Jews only accept the texts written in Hebrew and in Aramaic, while Christians add texts translated into Greek (Sirach) or written directly in that language (Wisdom), which include some that emerged in the first century before Christ.
During the course of these thousands of years of redaction, later texts contained reflections upon the previous texts, commenting on them, pointing back to them. The fifth book of the first five books of the Bible, which Christians call Deuteronomy (in Greek: ‘the second law’) and the Jews call ‘the repetition of the Torah’ (Mishneh Torah), is a reflection upon the laws contained in the three previous books.
The danger for the reader of the Old Testament is to place all these texts on the same plane, to consider them as if they had the same status, while one must pay the closest attention to the literary genre of each book: historical narrative, poem, parables …
The New Testament also contains different literary genres: the four Gospels, the narratives of the life, teachings, and passion of Jesus; the Acts of the Apostles, the history of the beginnings of the spread of Christianity; the Epistles, letters written by the principal apostles to the communities for which they felt responsible; finally, the Apocalypse, a book of revelations. Their authors differ; one can even discern different schools of interpretation of the life of Jesus. Nonetheless, the New Testament presents a greater unity than the Old, it is written in one language, a popular Greek (koiné), and its redaction only occurred over a few decades.
The Quran, at least on the surface, has a greater unity: it is the work of one hand, in which intertextuality abounds (repetitions, citations, allusions). The main difficulty in reading it resides in its very obscure vocabulary, for the very simple reason that the Quran itself is the oldest work in the Arab language that we possess, with the exception of a few inscriptions and, perhaps, certain poems (the so-called ‘anteislamic poetry’) which could have been rewritten at a later date, and adapted to a more recent state of the language for better understanding.11 We therefore lack a context, a base-line, which allows us to interpret it.
With Judaism, Christianity, and Islam we have three religions, each of which has its book, but which has a different relationship with the book. At the risk of oversimplifying, I would express these relations in three formulas that I will develop shortly. The religion of Israel is a history that led to a book; Christianity is a history recounted in a book; Islam is a book that leads to a history.
Let us begin chronologically with Judaism, taken in a large sense. The religion of ancient Israel did not rest exclusively on the existence of a book. It was during the course of its history that the library that we call the Old Testament was composed, and it was composed in circumstances closely connected with the political development of the people.
The religion of ancient Israel is a national religion, a worship offered to its god by a people, in the same way that neighbouring peoples offered their worship, hymns, and sacrifices to their gods. This religion had sacrifices, feasts, and places of worship which, at a certain period, were reduced to one: the Temple at Jerusalem, the clergy of which exercised a sort of monopoly.
In the course of this history, a certain number of documents were produced, such as chronicles of kings. A people loves to sing of its glorious ancestors, the patriarchs; this, in part, is the subject of Genesis. Israel also codified the civil and penal code the king imposed on his people. Priests wrote down the ritual of the Temple at Jerusalem, as well as its collection of hymns.
Judaism properly speaking, Judaism in the narrow sense, was constituted by a series of tragic events in the history of Israel. Around 70 ce, to be a Jew could no longer mean being the subject of the king of Israel, nor inhabiting the land since the majority of the Jewish people did not live there; the Romans ended matters by forbidding the Jews to live in Palestine. Nor could it consist in offering sacrifices in the Temple, which had been destroyed. The people no longer had a principle of identity. What remained was a way of life, whose political, moral, and domestic rules had been formulated by the Torah. This is the meaning of the suffix ‘-ism’ in Judaism. Judaism consists in conducting oneself as if in the land of Judah (the region of Jerusalem), by focusing upon the Torah, by following its rules. The Torah itself was interpreted as a rule of life; this is the meaning of the Hebrew word halakha which signifies the path to follow, the ‘way to conduct one’s life’.
Judaism is therefore a religion of a book in an entirely different sense from the religion of ancient Israel, which rested on the political, economic, and cultural life of a nation, a nation which produced a book. Judaism is almost entirely different: it is the book which produced the nation. According to the expression of Heinrich Heine, the Bible is the ‘portable homeland’ of every Jew.12 To be a Jew is to follow the rules of the Torah, which constitute the deepest identity of a people and which, therefore, require to be more and more precisely specified. To it were added discussions concerning the manner of precisely interpreting the commandments and the prohibitions given by God; this formed the Talmud.
Christianity is first of all a fact, a movement, an event tied to the specific person of Jesus of Nazareth; the book was posterior. When the evangelists recounted the history of Jesus, their aim was not to write a biography but to show that the life of Jesus of Nazareth completed the meaning of the history of Israel, and even of human life as such. The beginning of Christianity was therefore first of all an event: the preaching of Jesus and the proclamation of his disciples who said that he was resurrected, that he appeared to a certain number of witnesses, and that he would return in glory.
The first Christians may have thought that the return of Jesus was near, that Jesus was going to manifest himself soon. They had neither the time nor the need to write this message. At most, one could write to the community to whom one had preached this extraordinary event, to ask it to wait patiently, not to lose hope. This is the content of the oldest texts of the New Testament, the two letters of St Paul to the Christians of Thessalonica. It was only in a second stage that they began to collect the sayings of Jesus, which contained rather remarkable expressions. It seems that they established lists of sayings, as well as of miracles, to which the four evangelists had access, and that these were combined with a historical framework, in order to produce the Gospels from these two sources.
We, therefore, have an event which is recounted afterwards in a book, but the essential was the event, not the book.
Islam is also an event: the first fact of Islamic history that we know by independent, identifiable sources is the seventh-century conquest by Arab tribes of the southern Mediterranean and of the Middle East to Iran. The origin of this expansion seems to be the preaching of an exceptional leader who succeeded in allying these tribes by inaugurating a conquest, perhaps of the entire world, of a vast territory in any event. The sayings of this preacher were collected at a date that can hardly be determined. According to Muslim tradition, Muhammad would have begun receiving messages from above towards 610 or 615. After having preached to his compatriots of Mecca without great success, around 622 he went to Medina, where he received a better welcome. He then would have returned with a force to Mecca a short while before his death in 632.
We do not know exactly when the Quran was brought together.13 According to the dominant tradition, it would have been the third successor of Muhammad, Osman (ʿUthmān), caliph from 644 to 656, who established a unified text. He would have had a certain number of copies made in order to send to the principal centres of the Arab army; he would have had other texts burned, which explains why there is only one, the deviant sources having been destroyed. Western scholars do not accept this version of the facts for various reasons, including contradictions in the narratives. They themselves, however, have arrived at contradictory conclusions.
The book plays in Islam, as a mode of life producing a civilization, a special place. It was necessary to give rules of life to all these conquerors of an immense territory, so that they could distinguish themselves from others. These rules were sought in the Quran. There they found certain rules attributed to God himself, for example, concerning questions of inheritance, marriage, of penal law. This however amounted to very little. They, therefore, were completed by declarations of the prophet, real or supposed, which became the source of law. What Muhammad, the perfect man, did, the Muslim ought to be able to do also, unless the text specifies that something was a privilege of the prophet (e.g. Q. 33: 50).
The concept of ‘revealed religion’ is also deceptive, because ‘revelation’ does not have the same meaning in the three religions.
What is revealed in Judaism is the history of the people of Israel. This history is more than the indifferent context within which something of God would have been revealed. The events themselves are at once the means of revelation and its object. The commands contained in the Torah were given by God at a certain moment in this history. Among them, which were directly revealed? The rabbis discussed the question: The entire Torah? The ten commandments? Solely the Name of God, all the rest having been uttered by Moses?
For Christianity, the revealed object is not the New Testament, but the person of Christ himself; the book only recounts the history, reports the teaching, of this person.
In Islam, the revealed object is truly the book; the person of Muhammad, at least in primitive Islam, had little importance. This is why one can consider Islam to be the sole religion of the book in the strict sense. For Islam, the Quran has for its author not Muhammad but God who dictated it to him; Muhammad was merely the scribe. In the same way, the author of Paradise Lost was Milton, not the daughter to whom, having become blind, he dictated his poem.
In Judaism and Christianity, the holy book is an inspired book, that is to say, written and composed by men who are ‘aided’ by God, in such a way that they do not teach any errors concerning his nature or his will. But nothing prevents the Bible from containing errors of fact, for example, in matters of chronology, nor from containing a vision of the physical universe that today is completely passé. For Islam, the Quran cannot contain error, contradiction, or supersedable content. What seems to be so is rectified in passages that are assumed to have been subsequently revealed. It is necessary that everything in the Quran be true, even definitive. That is why an abundant, and regularly revised, literature attempts to show, with each new scientific discovery, that it was contained in the Quran.
If the revealed objects differ, the revealed content of these objects differs as well. For Judaism and Christianity, revelation is a self-manifestation of God by himself. A manifestation of God which, because it is personal, necessarily remains mysterious. For Islam, God does not manifest himself as he is in himself, but only expresses his will in uttering commands. And there is no question of him entering into human history by contracting an alliance with man.
Thus, the presence of a book, a fact common to all three religions, masks three different ways of relating to that book. These, in turn, flow from the three different ideas of the way in which these sacred books were communicated to men.
One can extend these observations with an even more provocative question. Is it the case that three religions really exist?
Let us begin with Christianity. It is a form of Judaism. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew, the twelve apostles as well, as was St Paul and the other authors of the New Testament. Christianity began as a sort of Jewish history, then it gradually, and painfully, separated itself from Judaism. On one hand, because Christians—those who followed St Paul—turned to the pagans to announce the good news of the resurrection. On the other hand, because the Jews considered the Christians to be heretics, and excluded them from the community. A tension emerged which ended with the gradual separation of the two religions, but from an initial unity.
Islam in contrast was born independently of Israel, far from the Holy Land, and among a people that was not Jewish. Muhammad was neither Jewish nor Christian. According to traditional history, he was rebuffed by the rabbis of Medina who refused to recognize his message. This is why he ‘theorized’ this difference, by claiming, as we saw, a connection with Abraham prior to the law of Moses and the life of Jesus.
Three religions therefore, or two? In a certain way, one can consider that we are in the presence of two ‘demi-religions’, on one hand, Judaism and the Christian rending of Jewish unity, and on the other, a religion, Islam, which one can consider, depending upon one’s view, as a second, or third, religion.
The answer to this question is not simple because Christianity has a ‘double’ holy book which includes the holy book of Judaism. The expression ‘the Bible’ merits attention. To say ‘the Old and the New Testament’ seems obvious. However, to retain the Old Testament was not obvious; during the second century ce primitive Christianity was tempted to discard the Old Testament. This was the endeavour of Marcion. For him, the God of the Old Alliance was a God of wrath, who was supplanted by the God of love of the gospel.14 The church did not follow this path, however, considering Marcion to be a heretic; it retained the paradox of a double holy book. Judaism and Christianity therefore have in common the Old Testament. The New Testament constitutes the way in which Christians interpret the events of the life of Jesus in the light of what had been announced, at least according to them, in the Old Testament.
Islam in contrast has a holy book that is proper to it. It is not understood as a sort of ‘Third Testament’. In fact, as we have seen, it is a fundamental teaching of Islam, without which it probably could not exist, that the books appealed to currently by the other two religions are not genuine. Islam, therefore, has no need of either the Old or the New Testament. In practice, it does not read them, sometimes it even forbids their being read.
We have already observed that two-and-a half religions, rather than three, exist. In the same way we have two-and-a half books rather than three, with the difference between Judaism and Christianity residing, rather naturally, in the reading given of the Old Testament, quite different in the two religions.
The use of the three expressions I just studied arises, to be sure, from the best will in the world. People seek to discern the common elements upon which they are all agreed, in order to make possible a productive dialogue. However, we know where good intentions often lead. In fact, the vocabulary I criticized gives rise to confusions rather than clarity. It masks real differences underneath a surface harmony. As a result, it produces the opposite of what it desires. If one wants to have a real dialogue, one must begin by respecting the other. This implies that one understand him as he understands himself, taking the words he uses with the meaning he gives them, and accepting the initial situation of disagreement, in order to move forward toward better understanding.
1 The first book that bore the express title Les trois monothéismes was a work by the psychoanalyst D. Sibony, which had as its subtitle Juifs, Chrétiens et Musulmans entre leurs sources et leurs destins (Paris: Le Seuil, 1992). The philosopher and scholar of Islam R. Arnaldez published Trois messagers pour un seul Dieu (Paris: Albin Michel, 1983), and À la croisée des trois monothéismes: une communauté de pensée au Moyen Age (Paris: Albin Michel, 1993).
2 This is the question posed by Gisel 2006: 13.
3 See, for instance, Ibn al-Kalbî (1969).
4 Maimonides 1972: 69, ‘First Tractate on the Resurrection’; trans. Fradkin 2000: 154.
5 Menahem ha-Meiri, Beth ha-Bḥira, on ‘Avoda Zara 53 [non vidi].
6 Maimonides 1972: 112, ‘Letter on the Persecution’, ch. 2; Maimonides 1989: II. 726, ‘Answer to Ovadia the Proselyte’.
7 John of Damascus, Heresy 100.5 (ed. Le Coz 1992: 218–20); La Chanson de Roland 1.8, 32.416–17, 47.611, etc. (ed. Jenkins 1924: 4, 40, 53, respectively).
8 I give these three key terms the meaning that they have in traditional Muslim exegesis. These words are obscure and their interpretation, especially the word muslim, anachronistic.
9 See my work, Brague 2005: 117–19, and above all, Lazarus-Yafeh 1992. The Indian reformer Ahmad Khan (1817–98)—against whom Jamâl ed-Dîn el-Afghanî wrote the Refutation of Materialists—seems to have been the first to propose the abandonment of this teaching. See Gisel 2006: 124.
10 See the excellent little book of A. Jeffery (1952).
11 This is the hypothesis of the Egyptian Ṭaha Ḥusayn (1926), in a work which rendered him quite suspect, Fī ʾshiʿir al-jāhilī [On Pre-Islamic Poetry] (re-edn, Cairo: Dâr al-Nahâr, 1995) [non vidi].
13 See de Prémare 2002 and his excellent little book, de Prémare 2004.
14 See the great book—finally available in French (even though it was published in 1924)—of A. von Harnack, Marcion: l’évangile du Dieu étranger. Une monographie sur l’histoire de la fondation de l’Église catholique, trad. B. Lauret et al. (Paris: Le Cerf, 2003).