The Call of the Minaret

Author: Terry L. Frazier | Source: Catholic.com

Joseph Smith and Shirley MacLaine are not alone when they use the line, "What Jesus really taught was not today's Christianity, but...[fill in the blank: Mormonism, reincarnation, whatever]." No one has been able to parallel Mohammed, the prophet of Islam, in creating a new Jesus out of the historic Christian teaching.

While Islam always has been a fierce competitor in missionary fields, it recently has begun having success similar to Mormonism's and the New Age movement's here in the United States. This was pointedly brought home to me recently by meeting two ex-Catholics (one claiming to be an ex-CCD instructor) who had converted to that religion and who now go around giving seminars on how to proselytize Christians.

In Mecca around A.D. 610, Mohammed began claiming to have revelations which he said he received from the angel Gabriel (cf. Gal.1:8). All these individual revelations, some immediately written down by his followers and others simply committed to memory, were gathered together at Mohammed's death in 632. The collection of revelations as a whole is called the "Qur'an" (the recitation) and each individual revelation is called a "surah," there being 114 surahs of varying length in the Qur'an.

The Caliph 'Uthman, the third Caliph to rule the Islamic theocracy (A.D. 644-656), ordered the final canonization of the Qur'an to settle disputes over the content of the text. Thus was produced in 657, twenty-five years after Mohammed's death, the authoritative version of the Qur'an which we know today. All other copies were ordered destroyed, which is an interesting historical fact in light of the undying Islamic polemic about Jews and Christians being unable to establish the integrity of the biblical texts.

According to the Qur'an, all the prophets going back to Abraham preached a simple monotheism called Islam (submission). Jesus, called "Isa" in the Qur'an, is only a prophet and not God. He too preached Islam and even prophesied the coming of Mohammed as the final prophet. The Qur'an teaches that Jesus was not crucified and will not be resurrected until the Day of Resurrection at the end of time.

Of course, if Jesus taught Islam and never claimed to be God, Jesus' message must have become corrupted at the very beginning. Consequently the Muslim takes a similar view to that of the Mormon in regard to the Bible. He reveres the Bible as a divine revelation, albeit a corrupted one.

(It is the rare Muslim who asks himself why God would fail to preserve his previous revelations from corruption. This attitude is especially curious when it is considered that the Qur'an itself regards the Bible so highly that Muslims are instructed to listen and believe what it teaches (e.g. Surahs al-Baqarah 2:136, Yunus 10:94, and al-'Ankabut 29:46).)

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