For paper

There is no such thing as a free lunch. Humans are keenly aware of this reality, this law of equivalent exchange, which states that everything has a price. There is no free lunch. The cost is always paid somewhere, even if it is not by you. If you want to take something, you have to give something of equal or greater value.


Why then, if humans are familiar with this, do they take from their natural surroundings without thinking time give anything back? It's a law that applies nearly everywhere, whether in human economic systems or ecological systems. Humans exploit resources because they think it's free for the taking, that there is no price to pay. Only, there is a price, and the debt is accumulating.

Trump

Trump became president today. I saw a rational, sane person support him, posting this:

This was my response.

If your faith was in God and Christ crucified, then you would remember what he was executed for; 1) sedition against the state and 2) challenging the status quo in favor of affirming the dignity of the marginalized, the outcast, the downtrodden, the socially undesirable, the other.

Trump's campaign was largely built on unfounded fear of these social undesirables, these others. People were talked into being afraid that the others would harm their country.

If you voted for Trump and believed his rhetoric based on fear of the other, then your faith was in an idol, in a nation, not Christ crucified.  You valued a sense of security over the love of Christ.

This is what shakes my faith.

Between the Bible and Qur'an - Final Paper

One of the commonalities shared by all three of the Abrahamic monotheist religions is the concept of the prophet. While differing in form and emphasis from tradition to tradition, prophets and prophethood occur in each. As the youngest of the three (chronologically speaking), Islam makes certain departures from biblical prophethood while retaining a strong sense of social justice. In what follows, I will examine the Prophet Muhammad's role as a prophet and social justice reformer, in ways both similar to and distinct from biblical notions of prophethood and social justice.¹ I will compare and contrast the bible and the Qur'an on these subjects, using the biblical example of the prophet Amos for illustration. I will conclude that Islamic and biblical forms of prophethood are similar and should give us cause to consider the nature of divine wrath as a theological response to concrete injustices.

1Please note that the lack of the proper adage “Peace be upon him” is omitted hereafter not out of disrespect, but in the interest of saving space and not bogging down the voice of the paper whenever his name is mentioned.

Before beginning, I would like to provide some context as to why the topic is of interest to me. This is ultimately in service of the paper, as I believe it will shed some light on why I called Islamic prophethood more overtly theological. As a student of biblical theology, I have gone through several expected phases; a phase of learning and exposure, a phase of integration, a phase of dogmatism, and a phase of introspection and self-critique. At present, I find that the thou shalt's and thou shalt not's of religion are not as interesting or motivating as the deep need for social justice that inspires religion. The three Abrahamic religions share this starting place. Put briefly, Judaism protests latifundialization (which will be defined later), Christianity protests the centralization of the Jewish temple and the mistreatment of the marginalized, and Islam protests the abuse of poor and the loss of the tribal ethic in organized society. I can no longer read the Hebrew scriptures with a literal interpretation, and subsequently, much of the magic is lost. But I've learned that it is possible to interpret these scriptures as emphasizing a rigorous sense of social justice, particularly in the biblical prophets, and I would argue that social justice should always take priority over doctrinal adherence. Part of what I find so interesting about the origins of Islam is that it is, in a way, a prophetic reaction to the spirit of latifundialization, albeit in a different form. It is with this in mind that I now turn to the biblical prophet Amos, to seek out the connection between prophethood and social justice. Later on, this connection will inform our examination of Islamic prophethood.

Amos is a prophetic Hebrew text, one of the Nevi'im, meaning the plural of the Hebrew word for prophet/spokesperson, Nevi. The Nevi'im is a collection of prophetic writings that stands as its own division in the Hebrew scriptures, alongside the Torah (instruction/law) and Ketuvim (writings, what we might call wisdom literature). Together they comprise the canon, the Tanakh, which stands as an acronym for the three. Of all the prophetic texts, Amos is the most straightforward and simple.² There is little that can illuminate Amos' historical conditions beyond its age as an older biblical text preceding the fall of the North Kingdom of Israel. Being so old, it is no surprise that it may have been subjected to multiple editors, making it unreadable as a first person account from an 8^th century BCE prophet.³ What can be inferred about the historical conditions, however, is that it was a time of economic difficulty, ritual infraction, and latifundialization.

The concept and historical realities of latifundialization are key to understanding the prophetic genre, of which Amos is a part. Latifundialization is a tale as old as time, the consolidation of power by a privileged elite over the common people, leading to economic disparity and poor quality of life for the poor, landed or otherwise. Possibly as a result of the collapse of the city state system in the eastern mediterranean, people dispersed into the eastern highlands to form subsistence settlements. Rather than work the farm of a king or aristocrat, people worked their own farms, called nachălâh (phonetic: nahk-al-aw), meaning possession, inheritance, property, portion, and heritage. It is consistently used to denote the plot of land for which each person/family is divinely ordained, a promised land for each person willing to tend it.⁴ It was not permissible to sell one's nachălâh, as it was given by God and Moses. Rather than integrate into a larger economy, settlements subsisted on what they grew themselves. This is, in many ways, reactionary to the integrated yet oppressive economy of the once prominent city state system.

But prior to the collapse of the Northern Kingdom at the hands of the Assyrian empire, Israel enjoyed the peak of its golden age (ironically named the Silver Age of Israelite history). Paul Shalom writes that during this period:

“Israel reached the summit of its material power and economic prosperity as well as the apogee of its territorial expansion. . .This geographical expansion, accompanied by thriving commerce and trade, resulted in an affluent society composed of a small, wealthy upper class. . .This opulence was accompanied by a panoply of pomp and ceremony and by an intensive and zealous religious life that was concretized both in a lavish cult and in elaborate rites that took place at the main northern shrines (Amos 4:4-5; 5:21-23). For the Israelites, all signs pointed to God's unlimited beneficial favor. His protection was assumed to be unconditional, and thus they felt totally secure in the present and thoroughly confident in their future.”⁵

Amos, as an observant outsider skilled in rhetoric, prophesied against this mentality of affluence and self-assured confidence, which was detrimental to the poor. With prosperity came industry and economic infrastructure that placed demand on production and saw nachălâh as irrelevant in the face of tangible profit. Farmland became invaluable to this end, leading to many subsistence farmers being pressured off their plots of land and into poverty. Meanwhile, the gilded rituals of the Israelite cult continued, the rich making lavish gestures of piety while the poor looked on. Amos saw this as an affront to the covenant between God and his people, a mentality of sin that accelerated the coming of the day of the Lord, which would bring certain punishment and doom.⁶ Alongside later figures in the prophetic tradition, Amos prophesied against these social and cultic evils, likely in the form of speeches to uneducated listeners.⁷ With vitriolic scorn, Amos invoked the image of a God moved to implacable wrath as a theological response to the concrete injustices of the Northern Kingdom.⁸ We can see that biblical prophethood (insofar as Amos is a prototypical example of the genre of classical prophecy) is largely concerned with social injustice and the mistreatment of the poor. It will now be shown that Islam began in similar circumstances, and that Islamic prophethood shares similar concerns, albeit in different terms.

To begin with, prophethood in Islam has etymological ties to biblical prophethood. The word Prophet is nevi in Hebrew and nabi in Arabic. It is not outside the realm of possibility that there was, at least on a linguistic level, a degree of influence from monotheistic/henotheistic Judaism in the Arabian peninsula. As Reza Aslan writes:

“Most scholars are convinced that by the sixth century C.E., henotheism had become the standard belief of the vast majority of sedentary Arabs, who not only accepted Allah as their High God, but insisted that he was the same god as Yahweh, the God of the Jews.”⁹

In fact, Jewish influences were so prevalent that most Arabs believed that the Ka'ba, the mysterious black stone structure in Mecca that has always served as the cultic center of Arabic organized religion, was built by Adam, destroyed during the flood, rebuilt by Noah, and then rediscovered by Abraham when visiting Ishmael and Hagar after their banishment at the behest of Sarah.¹⁰ Needless to say, the Arab account of the origin of the Ka'ba is heavily populated by biblical figures and concepts. The Ka'ba before and during Muhammad's time housed idols for the sedentary and beduin Arabs of the entire Hijaz (or Western Arabian peninsula), making it a distinctly Arabic landmark; if such an Arabic cultural symbol as the Ka'ba was thought to be founded and attended by key biblical figures, then it is a clear sign that biblical stories, concepts, and monotheistic tendencies had trickled into the collective Arabian consciousness. The same inevitably became true of Christian beliefs and stories, of which the Qur'an appears very familiar.¹¹

Islam was not only receptive to biblical notions of prophethood, but it also innovated upon them, most notably in the distinction drawn between nabi (prophet) and rasul (messenger).¹² Similar to how apostles outrank prophets in importance in Christianity, a messenger outranks a prophet in Islam.¹³ For example, Qur'an 22:52: “We have never sent any messenger or prophet before you [Muhammad] into whose wishes Satan did not insinuate something, but God removes what Satan insinuates and then God affirms His message.” Whenever a messenger or a prophet are mentioned in the same sentence, the messenger takes precedence and is spoken of first, the implication being that the messenger has vital purpose and the prophet, comparatively speaking, does not.¹⁴ Moreover, the titles of messenger and prophet may refer to the same person: “Mention too, in the Scripture, the story of Moses. He was specially chosen, a messenger and a prophet.”¹⁵ Evidently, the messenger and the prophet represent two different but related roles. Moses was both rasul and nabi, as were Abraham, Jesus and most notably, Muhammad. All rasul are nabi, but not all nabi are rasul.

Rasul bear messages from God, which invariably become scripture. In this sense, the people to which a rasul appeared and bore a message became people of the book. The Christians and Jews had become people of the book, but the Arabs had not. It is tempting to speculate that part of what motivated the formation of Islam was a desire to be part of a broader community of believing monotheists sharing the same stories. This was part of Muhammad's goal after the Hijra, the expulsion from Mecca and the move to Medina. This desire for community, unfortunately, became frustrated by various socio-political and partisan factors, which fall beyond the scope of this paper.

It is worth noting that Islam is the only one of the three Abrahamic monotheisms to imply the prophetic significance of a woman. Hagar, the biblical wife of Abraham who was cast out by Sarah and left in the wilderness, is revered as a matriarchal figure. “As 'the mother of Arabs,' she not only gave birth to Ishmael but was herself a faithful messenger appointed by the one God.”¹⁶ While not included in the Qur'an, Hagar is present in a collection of hadith, the reports or stories which people told of Prophet Muhammad and his legacy. While not strictly authoritative, these stories serve as extra-Qur'anic literature that enriches the Islamic tradition. Of great interest is the following: “[The story of Hagar] appears in a number of overlapping traditions in the hadith, book 15:9, called The Anbiya (Prophets).”¹⁷ While not named nabi or rasul, Hagar is spoken of in nearly prophetic terms. Furthermore, she gave birth to Ishmael, whose name meant “God listens” or “God hears.” In a sense, Hagar delivered a message, that is, she was rasul. No other Abrahamic tradition uses prophetic language in reference to a biblical woman as Islam does.

This is key to an understanding of social justice in Mecca at the time of Muhammad; the plight of women and orphans in society were of central interest. This is because the Quraysh, the ruling tribe who controlled Mecca and financially benefitted from the Ka'ba as a holy site, were more concerned with the accumulation of wealth than with providing for the poor.¹⁸ Meccan society in the 6^th century CE was highly stratified, with wealthy Quraysh tribesman, along with any clan or enterprising family that succeeded in profiting alongside the Quraysh, on top. The city economy centered around the Ka'ba and its significance as a pilgrimage site. After all, the idols and holy symbols of all tribes in the hijaz were housed in the Ka'ba, meaning that any pilgrim seeking to pay respects would be obliged to pay the Quraysh for access. This ownership of pilgrimage rites put the Quraysh tribe at the top of a lucrative religio-economic system that was polytheistic, but with strong henotheistic concepts floating around in the air.¹⁹

Like the affluent northern kingdom against which Amos prophesied, Meccan society was pious but uncharitable. Widows and orphans suffered the most under this system. The social egalitarianism that once dominated Arab beduin life was non-existent in sedentary Meccan society, meaning that anyone unable to turn a financial profit was vulnerable to abuse. As with Canaanite farmers forced off their nachălâh by the advent of industrial demand, orphans and widows were forced to borrow money at high interest to survive, which resulted in debt and slavery. Muhammad was keenly aware of this, being himself an orphan who only survived by the charity and goodwill of others.²⁰ Polygamy was common, which meant that some wives were neglected in favor of others. In general, women were denied inheritance and often mistreated, and as noted above, the other Abrahamic religions did not always speak warmly of the women in their texts, and they most certainly did not apply prophetic language to them. It was in this setting of inequity and socio-economic oppression that Muhammad, who was a quietly pious man in adulthood, is said to have experienced a revelation from God.

Of the man Muhammad, little can be said with historical accuracy. Even the date of his birth is uncertain, though most are content with putting it at 570 CE. However, it is easy to see from a literary critical method perspective that he was groomed in the literature for prophethood. The sīra, the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, is full of stories that intend to present Muhammad in a prophetic light.²¹ For example, one story of Muhammad as a boy details his being selected out of a group by the Christian monk Bahira, who possessed a book of secret prophecies. Upon examining the boy, Bahira proclaimed that Muhammad was “the Messenger of the Lord of the Worlds,” nabi and rasul.²² Aslan interprets such stories as having the function of prophetic topos, which is a literary hallmark of prophetic literature. Just like all significant biblical figures before him, Muhammad was given a significant gravitas in the form of written text. There were signs and omens surrounding him before he was even ten. As a consequence, the Qur'an is often interpreted in light of the sīra. A key theme of the Qur'an is the intimate connection between Muhammad and God's revelation in the form of recitation, meaning that it is difficult to accurately reconstruct Muhammad's life with non-Qur'anic material.²³ It is also problematic to do historical critical analysis of the Prophet when so much of the literature is more interested in legitimating him as nabi and rasul alongside the likes of Abraham, Moses and Jesus than in providing accurate historical content for the sake of posterity. This is not surprising in ancient literature, religious or otherwise. The Qur'an likely developed organically as the result of multiple voices speaking to the significance of one man's message, but the hermeneutic emphasis ultimately falls on significance of Muhammad's voice as rasul.

When Muhammad began to do the work of a messenger, reciting the words revealed to him by God, it unsurprisingly sparked the wrath of the Quraysh, who perceived it as a challenge to the religio-economic system they built.²⁴ This was not because Muhammad was attempting to introduce an uncompromising monotheism, as monotheism was not in itself a shocking concept in Mecca. Rather, it is because of the shahahad, the Islamic profession of faith: there is no god but God (meaning that there was no earthly intermediary, no Quraysh or Ka'ba, between the believer and God) and Muhammad is His prophet (Muhammad is the rasul, the one bearing a message from God). Muhammad was claiming no authority in himself, only that he was commanded to recite what had been revealed to him. This was a direct affront to the authority of the Quraysh as the keepers of the Ka'ba. The challenge was twofold: it was a theological announcement that the Meccan religio-economic system was without essential worth and it was a call for social reform. As Ahmed Afzaal wrote in his article, The Origin of Islam as a Social Movement:

“Contemporary sociological research often distinguishes between religious movements and social movements, but it is not possible to adequately capture the life and career of Prophet Muhammad in terms of only one of these frameworks. . .the socio-political aims of Prophet Muhammad's struggle were the necessary and inevitable – yet mostly implicit and tacit – consequences of his religio-ethical vision. . .the kind of religio-ethical reforms Prophet Muhammad wished to implement in his society were of such a nature and scope that they would not have been possible without active engagement with socio-political structures and processes.”²⁵

In other words, the shahadah and the public preaching of Islam in Mecca were not exclusively theological. Embedded in the message Muhammad bore as rasul was a cry on the behalf of the poor. Muhammad's prophethood, like that of Amos, had concrete socio-economic goals, namely reforms that would result in an improvement in the quality of life for those unjustly mistreated by the entrenched infrastructure of society. These reforms challenged the status quo.

The shahadah was a call for a religio-ethical system. It condemned ethical wrongdoing formerly condoned or ignored by society by reminding them of the reality of judgment and the omnipresent eye of God, who saw and remembered all.²⁶ In this sense, it was ethical and social in emphasis. But it was also overtly theological, challenging the religious equivalent of latifundialization that the Quraysh had established, wherein their control of the Ka'ba meant that the people's worship was not their own; worship could only happen on the terms of cultic centralization implemented by the Quraysh. Islam's voice was also a cry against the injustice of not being able to worship freely and without human intermediaries, not unlike the first spark of the Christian movement.²⁷ Finally, it was also, like Amos 5:21-24, a warning of God's omnipotence and omniscience, which would be brought to bear against sinners in the fires of judgment; it was speaking of divine wrath as a theological response to concrete injustices in Meccan society.

The similarities and differences in biblical and Qur'anic prophetic voice should be evident by this point; 1) both speak from the ground up, condemning different forms of latifundialization from the perspective of the poor and not the rich, 2) both are reflections on the behavioral and historical state of society, 3) both invoke images of God's wrath and indignation at the socio-religio-economic injustices committed by society, 4) the Prophet Muhammad prescribes a fleshed out religio-ethical system where Amos does not, 5) Islamic prophethood elaborates on biblical prophethood by adding a distinction of roles between nabi and rasul, of which Muhammad was both, and 6) both invoke images of divine wrath as a theological response to concrete injustices.²⁸

If there is anything that I personally take from this comparison/contrast, it is that Islamic prophetic voice, at its core, is not inconsistent with biblical prophethood. The emphasis may be different, but they are concurrent on what concrete points they address. God's wrath is clearly defined in terrifying detail, and while I may have found this unattractive in my youth, I now realize how powerful this imagery was to its original audiences. The bible and the Qur'an both were written in a world hungry for justice, waiting for the divine wrath of God to address the wrongs and systemic evils that perpetuated themselves in society. Whether it is the deluge of Amos or the fire of the Qur'an, prophetic voice speaks to real injustices suffered by real people, men and women both. Perhaps a wrathful God has a rightful place in our holy books. Whether nabi or rasul, prophets bear important messages, and I find myself more open to the message of the Qur'an now.

Works Cited:

Brettler, Marc Z. How to Read the Bible. First ed. Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2005. 152-160. Print.

Holy Bible: New Revised Standard Version. San Francisco, Harper One, 1989.

Shalom, Paul M. A Commentary on the Book of Amos. First ed. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1991. 1-2. Print.

Aslan, Reza. No god but God: The Origins and Evolution of Islam. First Edition ed., New York City, Random House, 2005, pp. 3-40.

The Qur'an. New York City, Oxford University Press, 2004.

Pippin, Andrew, editor. The Blackwell Companion to The Qur'an. First Edition ed., Malden, MA, Blackwell Publishing, 2006, pp. 197-241.

Trible, Phyllis, and Letty M. Russell, editors. Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children. Fir ed., Louisville, KY, Westminster John Knox Press, 2006, pp. 9-152.

Afzaal, Ahmed. "The Origin of Islam as a Social Movement." Islamic Studies, vol. 42, no. 2, 2003, pp. 205-16. JSTOR. Accessed 11 Nov. 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/20837269

1Please note that the lack of the proper adage “Peace be upon him” is omitted hereafter not out of disrespect, but in the interest of saving space and not bogging down the voice of the paper whenever his name is mentioned.

2Brettler, How to Read the Bible, p 160

3Brettler, p 152

4Exodus 15:17, Numbers 26:53 NRSV

5Paul Shalom, A Commentary on the Book of Amos, pp 1-2

6Shalom, p 2

7 Isaiah 5:9; Micah 2:1-2, NSRV

8Amos 5:21-24, NRSV

9Aslan, No God but God: The Origins and Evolution of Islam, p 7

10Aslan, p 3

11Qur'an – Haleem translation, Surah 5:109-120

12Blackwell Companion to the Qur'an (BCQ), p 240

131^st Corinthians 12:28-31 NRSV

14BCQ, p 241

15Qur'an, Surah 19:51

16Hagar, Sarah and Their Children (HSaTC), p 9

17HSaTC, p 152.

18Aslan, p 24

19Aslan, p 18-19

20Aslan p 25

21BCQ, 197

22Aslan, 23

23BCQ, 199-201

24Aslan, p 40

25Ahmed Afzaal, The Origin of Islam as a Social Movement, p 205

26Qur'an, Surah 2:77, 14:38

27Mark 11:15-19, NRSV

28Afzaal, 216"

Loss

I think there comes a point in the life of every struggler on life's path when the inner reservoir runs dry; when broken bones and sallow flesh grow heavy, when the arm can no longer grasp the hilt of a sword, when the armor breaks, when the fire sputters out and all that remains is embers and ash, when injury compounds upon injury, when recovery is no longer possible, when the wound runs too deep and breaks open again, when the skin turns bloodless and pale, when the wolves circle in the dark periphery, when the will to lift one foot in front of the other is shattered.

We all begin life with a passion and a desire, with a longing for a place where we can rest, a place where we can be safe, a place where struggle ceases and loving begins. The world, and the human spirit whose ontological responsibility it is to live out its allotted term of life, are both inherently good.

But the reality is that what once was is no more. We remember things that were inherently good and beautiful to us, but the passage of time is cruel; these things are slowly degraded, defaced, and destroyed. We feel their absence, each memory a scar. Pain, compounded by memory of better times, pervades every subsequent moment. And eventually we lose even the bittersweet faculty of memory, damaged and hurt, but unable to account for the pain. Because that's what life is; life is prolonged pain and the frustration of longing. Life is an extended exercise in loss.

And God is there, always present, always smiling, always detached, and always beyond reach. There is no life apart from God. A sound might as well think of its life apart from the air it moves in, or a fish, of water. But everything that is created is subject to decay. Hearts and bodies break, dreams fade, hope withers, and humanity learns in horror that it is alone. The object of all longing is just beyond reach, and every effort to reach it invariably results in injury to both flesh and spirit. No, the question is not whether or not God exists, but whether or not God is cruel.

"Why are we still here? Just to suffer? Every night, I can feel my leg... and my arm... even my fingers. The body I've lost... the comrades I've lost... won't stop hurting... It's like they're all still there. You feel it, too, don't you?" -Kazuhira Miller, The Phantom Pain.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RiS1xQoQvKE