It's All About Mohammed

Christianity and Islam: A Common Heritage?

WILLIAM KILPATRICK

. . . Despite all the fashionable talk about our shared heritage, there is no organic connection between Islam and Christianity as there is between Christianity and Judaism. Muhammad borrowed ideas and stories from the Torah and the Gospels, but the Koran can hardly be considered an outgrowth or fulfillment of either. It’s more accurate to say that Muhammad hitched a ride on the Jewish and Christian traditions. He saw them, in other words, as a vehicle for his own aspiration. And that aspiration—which jumps out from almost every page of the Koran—was to be a prophet.

Initially, Muhammad seemed content to be accepted as a prophet within the Jewish tradition, but when he was rebuffed by the Jews of Medina, it became apparent that his motivation was simply to be a prophet at any cost. Muhammad began to accuse the Jews and Christians of having distorted and falsified the revelations that were given to them, and he presented the Koran as the pristine revelation that the Jews and Christians had been guilty of distorting.

And what was the revelation? Ali Sina, the author of Understanding Muhammad, puts it this way:

What was his message? The message was that he had become a messenger and people had to believe in him…. Beyond that there is no other message. (p. 15) . . .

Islam is nothing but Muhammadanism. Muslims claim that they worship no one but Allah. Since Allah was only Muhammad’s alter ego, his other alias and invisible sock-puppet, in practice, it’s Muhammad whom they worship. (p. 7)

Prince Caetani, an early twentieth-century scholar of Islam, makes the same point in a slightly more elegant way:

It is thus the person of Mohammed that stands out above all in the front rank, till to God is given a secondary position in His capacity as the auxiliary of the Prophet. He is no longer the Supreme Being, for whose service everything should be sacrificed, but rather the all-powerful Being who aids the Prophet in his political mission, who facilitates his victories, consoles him in defeat, assists him in unravelling all the mundane and worldly complications of a great Empire over men, and helps him smooth over the difficulties which rise up every day as he works out these new phases of his prophetic and political career. (Cited in Ibn Warraq, Why I Am Not a Muslim, p. 88.)

http://www.crisismagazine.com/2014/common-heritage