Fuad Nahdi.    

870 words

7 December 1996

The Guardian

ISLAM is the only non-Christian faith whose scriptures accord explicit recognition to Jesus. However Muslims famously refuse to believe in Christ: that figure of divinity who gazes down from dim Byzantine cupolas. In Christ's place, Islam puts Jesus of Galilee, seen as a perfect man, an illuminated Prophet who was summoned to the one true God, and whose glory lay not in divinity, but in its opposite: an absolute servanthood before God.

 The Nativity account in the Koran exists largely to make this point. Mary, whose immaculate conception is affirmed even more clearly in the Koran than in the New Testament, is portrayed as a Temple virgin, a saint and contemplative who seldom leaves the sacred precincts. But the Koran narrates that Gabriel appeared to her to give her the good news of "a boy most pure," who would be "a sign and a mercy unto mankind."

 Muslim commentators explain how the first to notice her pregnancy was Joseph, a fellow-worshipper in the Temple. "Can a tree grow without water?" he demanded of her. She serenely replied that if Adam had been born without parents, then God could surely create a child without a father. He was the first to believe the miracle, and offered to marry her to protect her from the scandal.

 The Koran tells how "she withdrew to a distant place" and how she sustained the pains of childbirth at the foot of a palm-tree, and cried, "Would that I were dead, and were a thing forgotten!" Yet an unseen voice consoled her: "Do not be grieved. The Lord hath set below thee a rivulet; shake also to thee the palm-trunk, and there shall come falling upon thee dates fresh and ripe."

 This vision of a woman by a palm-tree, alone in the Judean wilderness, is Islam's alternative to the familiar Christian scene of Magi, shepherds, and adoring oxen. Thus far its purpose is to magnify Mary, not Jesus. The Virgin Birth is understood not as the avoidance of defilement - for other prophets including Muhammad have been conceived by more normal means - but as one of Mary's miracles with no further significance.

 Then the infant Jesus enters the story. He replies to those Jews who are horrified by Mary's apparent lack of chastity. She signals that they must speak to the child and they mock her, "How shall we speak to one who is still in the cradle, a baby?" Then the infant speaks: "Lo I am God's servant. He has given me the Scripture, and appointed me a Prophet. He has made me blessed wherever I may be. Peace be upon me on the day I was born, and the day I shall die, and the day when I shall be raised up alive!"

 The first words of the Koranic Jesus underline his humanity. In the Muslim understanding, the greatest human beings are those who are without ego, and are all Spirit, serving humanity for the love of God. The heart of the true "servant of God" is a mirror from which all imperfections have been polished away and in which the light of God shines. This, for Muslims, is the error of Christianity: the early Christians were so dazzled by the divine light coruscating in the heart of Jesus that they worshipped the mirror rather than the One reflected therein.

 THE Muslim objection to the Christian Nativity has a further aspect. The light of God shone perfectly in the heart of Jesus. But to make Jesus the sole manifestation of perfection would be to limit the love of God. The Koran says, "every people has been sent a guide," and God "makes no distinction between any of His messengers."

 The light is one, but the mirrors have their own properties, being lodged in humans who were integral parts of historic cultures. The ministry of Moses differed from that of Noah, Abraham, or Muhammad. The light is refracted like a rainbow to manifest the divine plenitude. Successfully emerging from the Gospel narratives is the figure of a loving, austere ascetic, who, while a committed Jew, stood in a distinctive Galilean mould in his charismatic preaching against the dry casuistry and ritualism of the Sanhedrin. He was a "caller to peace", as the Koran affirms, but also, as St John's Gospel reminds us, a righteous militant who could drive moneychangers from the Temple. In short, both a historically believable figure and a selfless moral exemplar.

His advent in the world could legitimately be commemorated by orthodox Muslims - although many believe the present consumerist bacchanalia would have repelled the barefoot Palestinian prophet - but we have a more recent ministry to proclaim and to celebrate: the birthday of the Prophet of Islam is a national holiday in almost every Muslim country. It is a time of reflection, of fairy lights and sugar dolls for children, of reading joyful devotional poems in mosques and homes. In places it has been secularised; but nowhere is it yet an orgy of Mammon, an annual celebration of decline.