Understanding Muslim Beliefs Through the Quran

What do Muslims believe?

My whole life I've been told what Muslims believe, but I never really

researched it for myself. So that's what I'm doing.

As someone who was raised Christian with decades of experience

studying the Christian scriptures, the Bible, I am using

those same skills, and I'm going through a study of the

Quran.

Not to convert, not to convince, but simply to

understand what it is that Muslims believe.

So if you're interested to learn what Muslims actually believe, what the

Quran actually says, with no agenda to prove it or disprove it,

then this is the study for you. And we are continuing on into the

second surah in, uh, ayahs 131 through

140. And this section is really helping me

understand how the Quran sees Abraham.

Because I grew up Christian, and I grew up thinking about the religious

family tree something like this. First came Judaism,

and then Christianity grew out of Judaism, and then centuries

later, Muhammad appears and Islam appears on the scene.

But that's not how the Quran is presenting its own story.

In verse 131, it says that God told Abraham to

submit, and Abraham answered, "I submit to the

Lord of all worlds." And that word submit, it really matters

because submission to God is at the heart of what the word Islam

actually means.

Then Abraham teaches his faith to his children, Jacob teaches

it to his children, and when Jacob is at the end of his life,

he asks his children, "Whom will you worship after I'm gone?"

And they

answer, "The God of Abraham, Ishmael, and Isaac, the one

God, and we submit to him." And there's Ishmael again.

I'm continuing to learn that the Quran gives Ishmael a much more

prominent place in the story of Abraham and his descendants than the

Christian tradition in which I was raised.

But then we get to what I think is the heart of this passage.

The Quran says that some are saying, "Become Jews or

become Christians and you will be rightly gri- guided." But

the response is, "No. Follow the way of

Abraham." And a few verses later, the Quran asks a pretty

fascinating question.

"Were Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, and Jacob, were they

Jews or were they Christians?"

And this is what I really got out of that argument.

See, they all lived long before any of those

religions were

created. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob,

they were on the scene before there was Judaism, before there was

Christianity. So when the Quran asks that question,

it is reaching back behind both of those religions

and saying, "Abraham belonged to God.

His faith was submission to the one God." And

Islam understands itself not as a brand-new religion

that suddenly appeared with

Muhammad, but as a continuation of the older

Abrahamic submission to God.

Now,

we...

Verse 136 helped me to understand that even more because it

says essentially, "We believe in God and what he revealed

to Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, and Jacob.

We believe in God and what he gave to Moses,

and what he gave to

Jesus, and what he gave to the other prophets."

Islam is saying, "We don't pick and choose between God's messengers."

And this is another place where I'm learning that Islam's claim about

Jesus is more complicated than I grew up believing Muslims

thought about Jesus. The Quran does not reject Jesus.

It claims Jesus as one of God's genuine messengers.

Now, it does absolutely reject some of

Christianity's central claims

about Jesus, especially that that Jesus was divine, and that is

a very real difference, and I'm not going to try to pretend

otherwise.

But Islam reveres Jesus. It has him standing in the line

with Abraham, Moses, and all of their other prophets that

are very highly revered. So there's

another the- theme running through this passage, and I,

uh,

as I keep going, I keep seeing it continue.

Twice the Quran essentially says, "Those people that have

passed away, they have what they have earned, and, and

you, you have what you have earned." We've seen

this

repeatedly now. Our religious heritage

doesn't give us a free pass. We don't inherit

Abraham's righteousness simply because we claim Abraham.

Your lineage doesn't matter. What you do matters.

You're not responsible for what your forefathers did, and neither do you

benefit from it. The bigger argument I'm seeing here

is that the

Quran isn't interested in your lineage.

It isn't interested in your claim to righteous ancestors.

It keeps asking over and over, "What do you believe?

Whom do you worship? How do you respond to God's

guidance?

How are you living?"

Abraham's faithfulness belonged to Abraham.

My faithfulness, or lack thereof, belongs to me.

The text is making the argument pretty clear, and it's saying

something that people are still arguing about thousands of

years later. Who gets to claim Abraham?

The Quran's answer seems to be, that's the wrong question.

The question isn't who gets to claim Abraham.

The question is, are we submitting to God the way Abraham

submitted to God?

I think that's a pretty interesting question,

and it's one for all of us to ask

ourselves.

Go love your neighbor.