Enemies for Your Sake: The Figure of the Jew in Paul and the Qur’an

[I delivered this paper at the conference “Figuring the Enemy” at St. Andrews University, June 6-8. Thank you to Scott Kirkland for the invitation!]

In this paper, I want to draw a comparison between the treatment of the figure of the Jew in the Pauline Epistles and the Qur’an, with the goal of illuminating the necessarily polemical nature of historical, revealed monotheism. I will begin by providing some background as to why such a juxtaposition has been only seldom attempted, explain how I came to see these two texts as related, and briefly suggest how the parallels might have come about. I will then develop a more detailed comparison and contrast, laying the groundwork for a conclusion in which I draw out some implications for our understanding of monotheism, in critical dialogue with Jan Assmann.

I.

Paul is conspicuously absent from the Qur’an. The sacred text of Islam mentions many figures from the New Testament, dwelling at great length on Jesus, Mary, Zechariah, and even mentioning that Jesus — alone among the Qur’anic prophets — had a special group of followers known as the “disciples.” All of those references, however, are solely to the Gospels, or to adjacent apocryphal literature, such as the Protoevangelium of James. Only the Gospel is mentioned alongside the Torah as an authentic earlier scripture in the Qur’an’s reckoning.

Yet even if Paul had been mentioned, the Qur’an also claims that the actual scriptural deposits held by contemporary Jews and Christians have been corrupted and that the Qur’an’s retelling of biblical stories are restoring the authentic originals. Hence there has historically been little curiosity among Islamic scholars about the Bible — why bother with the corrupt version when you have the real thing? Virtually the only extended engagement with Paul in the medieval Islamic tradition is ‘Abd al-Jabbār’s 10th-century Critique of Christian Origins, which portrays the Apostle as a scheming Jew who was instrumental in corrupting the original Gospel message. Along the way, he introduces many fanciful and sometimes offensive stories and evinces only a fragmentary knowledge of the epistles themselves.

Modern scholars of the Qur’an have largely left Paul aside as well. The motives, to the extent we can assign motives to this kind of lacuna, likely vary. On the one hand, scholars who are broadly sympathetic to Islam accept the basic traditional narrative that the Qur’an was revealed to Muhammad during his lifetime and assembled within the lifetime of his close companions. Most members of this group therefore usually attempt to square the circle between a secular perspective on the Prophet’s activities and the Islamic claim that he was an “unlettered prophet” — i.e., he didn’t directly study previous scriptural texts, but may have vaguely picked them up by osmosis. On the other hand, there are more hostile scholars who often advance far-fetched and, in my view, borderline conspiratorial narratives of a late origin of the Qur’an, which cuts the figure of Muhammad out of the picture. In place of any serious engagement with the Qur’an as a theological text with cohesive themes, they attempt to trace the lost Syriac text (or whatever) that lay at the basis of it.

Nevertheless, simply as a reader who is familiar with both texts, I cannot help but think there is an important connection to be made here. I first approached the Qur’an for the sake of my teaching, as my dean called upon me to fill in a gap in our course offerings after the faculty member who taught Eastern religions retired. As a scholar of Christianity, I figured that Islam would be the nearest reach. Hence I set to work reading the suras of the Qur’an in approximate chronological order — with no particular “angle” or agenda, and perhaps even a little irritated that this demand was interfering with my summer research plans.

When I got to Sura 2, The Cow (which comes early in the printed text but relatively late in the Prophet’s ministry), I was struck by the following passage: “They say, ‘Become Jews or Christians, and you will be rightly guided.’ Say [Prophet], ‘No, [ours is] the religion of Abraham, the upright, who did not worship any god besides God’” (2:135; using Haleem translation here and throughout; all brackets represent attempted clarifications by the translator). This sounded very similar to Paul’s attempts in Galatians and Romans to get back behind the Law of Moses by connecting his preaching to the more primordial figure of Abraham. When I got to Sura 3, The Family of Imran, the parallel had become unmistakable:

People of the Book, why do you argue about Abraham when the Torah and the Gospels were not revealed until after his time? … Abraham was neither a Jew nor a Christian. He was upright and devoted to God, never an idolater, and the people who are closest to him are those who truly follow his ways, this Prophets, and [true] believers—God is close to [true] believers. (3:65-68)

How can one not think of the passages where Paul argues for the priority of Abraham’s pure faith over against the later covenant of Moses? In Galatians, he specifies that “the law, which came four hundred thirty years later, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God” (Galatians 3:17), and in Romans he points out that Abraham’s faith was reckoned to him as righteousness “not after, but before he was circumcized” (4:10), so that he can be the ancestor of both uncircumcised and circumcised believers.

No one who had attended Ted Jennings’ seminar on Romans could possibly miss these parallels. Nevertheless, I did not find much affirmation of my intuitions in the scholarship. In my admittedly far from exhaustive study of literature on the Qur’an, I have found almost zero mention of any relationship between the Qur’an’s deployment of the figure of Abraham and the Apostle Paul’s. The one exception is the biography of the Prophet by Juan Cole, probably known to some in the audience as an anti-Iraq War blogger. Breaking with both trends of the scholarship I mentioned above, Cole both accepts the historicity of the Prophet Muhammad as the vehicle for the revelation of the Qur’an over a relatively short period of time but nevertheless avoids the kid-gloves approach to the notion of the “unlettered prophet.” For Cole, Muhammad was a successful merchant and hence would have been multi-lingual as a matter of course. Moreover, he was a spiritual seeker long before he started receiving the Qur’anic revelations, and so he would have eagerly devoured any theological or scriptural literature he could get his hands on.

Hence Cole is able to make connections to texts from Judaism, Christianity, and various heretical or non-mainstream sects of both, as well as many other religious and intellectual movements — including the letters of Paul. Indeed, he takes the connection further. In an unpublished SBL paper he generously shared with me, Cole suggests that Pauline studies might provide a useable paradigm for Qur’anic studies, and in fact his biography of the Prophet, which aims to use the Qur’an rather than the traditional biographical narratives as the primary source, is constructed on the model of a biography of Paul drawn from the internal timeline implied by the letters rather the account in Acts.

Although he is definitely an outlier in terms of reconstructing the Prophet’s literary borrowings, even Cole stops short of making any strong claim that Muhammad sat down and read the literal texts of Paul. I don’t want to make any strong claim, either. Instead, I want to suggest that it ultimately doesn’t matter. Even if Muhammad studied the texts of Paul, that does not, in itself, “explain” why those precise rhetorical moves appeared at such crucial moments in the Qur’an. As the man says, “the cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart.” Whether they are borrowed or independently discovered, the rhetorical and theological parallels are rooted in their shared rhetorical and theological situation as messengers who have arrived “too late” and must shore up their legitimacy in the face of a pre-existing monotheistic tradition (or range of traditions).

The situation is doubtless more complicated in Muhammad’s case given that the centuries that separate him from Paul saw the rise of Christianity, in all of its bewildering and mutually antagonistic forms. In a sense, though, Paul himself is already dealing with multiple versions of Christianity as well, as shown in his “so I says to the guy”-style account of his debate with Peter in Galatians or the delicate tightrope he walks with Apollos in 1 Corinthians. For both Paul and Muhammad, one would initially assume that the debate with Christians is the more salient one—in Paul’s case because he is primarily concerned with the requirements for Gentile believers to join the Christian movement and in Muhammad’s because orthodox Trinitarianism and Christology clearly violate the Qur’anic prohibition of “associating partners with God” — yet both focus much more on the original bearers of the monotheistic revelation: the Jews.

II.

At first glance, Paul and Muhammad’s respective position with regard to the Jews could not be more different. Most notably, Paul is himself a Jew of impeccable credentials: “circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless” (Philippians 3:5-6). As the Apostle to the Gentiles, Paul has the role of bringing an essentially Jewish message to the previously excluded nations.  Muhammad, for his part, claims no Jewish descent, and the Qur’an proudly declares itself an Arabic revelation for Arabs. Paul is also preaching a message that he understands to be the culmination or fulfillment of the Jewish revelation, whereas—at least until the later years of Muhammad’s career — the Qur’an presents the Prophet’s message as merely the latest in a series of such messages to individual nations.

Despite those very important differences, however, both Paul and Muhammad are clearly rankled by the failure of the Jews to accept their respective messages—albeit not to the same degree. Whereas the Prophet recognizes that the Jews have a special relationship to God and to the Scriptural heritage, making their failure to acknowledge his prophetic message a clear challenge to his prophetic legitimacy, that is not as pressing an issue as the refusal of Paul’s fellow countrymen’s to accept their own ostensible messiah. The gap begins to close as Muhammad becomes a political leader in Medina, where some Jewish groups explicitly ally with him and thus become quasi-insiders, but even then, Muhammad’s ultimate goal is to establish an ecumenical community of monotheists: “The [Muslim] believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians—all those who believe in God and the Last Day and do good—will have their rewards with their Lord. No fear for them, nor will they grieve” (2:62). (No one is quite sure who the Sabians are, but surely that only highlights the open-ended inclusiveness of the Qur’an’s vision!)

Once we take into account those key differences in their respective situation and degree of emotional investment in Jewish acceptance of their message, what’s remarkable is how similar their strategies are for negotiating their relationship with the Jewish monotheistic heritage. For the sake of imposing some order on two infamously disorganized bodies of literature, I will assess their approach to three interrelated issues in turn: the question of Jewish privilege, the place of the Jewish law, and the prospects of salvation for the Jews.

So first, Jewish privilege. As we have seen, both Paul and the Qur’an attempt to displace Jewish privilege by using Abraham to make an end-run around Moses. Both also deploy the primal scene of the Garden of Eden to emphasize the universality of their respective messages, though this move is much more prominent in Paul than in the Qur’an. This likely reflects the fact that the Prophet’s mission in the Qur’an is not initially envisioned as having the same universal scope as Christ’s. Indeed, the very fact that no prophet is fully definitive, that each is part of an open-ended series, seems to displace the privilege of previous prophets such as Moses or Jesus.

This strategy is especially evident in the earlier revelations, which intersperse the familiar biblical prophets with messengers to various ancient cities of Arabia — whose ruins would regularly be seen by traveling merchants — and radically downplay the fact that the biblical prophets are all part of the same family tree. For the Qur’an, a perennial monotheistic message has come down through many prophets at many places and times, and only very late in the Qur’anic revelation do we get any hint that Muhammad, as “seal of the prophets” (33:40), is anything other than one prophet among many.

Yet a form of particularism does return, precisely through the figure of Abraham. As we have seen, Paul turns Abraham into the father of those who believe in Christ and, in Galatians, reinterprets Christ as the singular “offspring” who will receive God’s promises to Abraham (3:16). Similarly, the Qur’an introduces a Muslim particularism into the Abraham story by stealthily replacing Isaac with Ishmael on Mount Moriah (37:99-111) and then has the father-son pair found the shrine at Mecca (2:125-129). Hence the “religion of Abraham” is both the perennial monotheism announced by all the prophets and the specific Mecca-centered rites preached by the Seal of the Prophets. In both cases, Jewish privilege is displaced and then reappropriated for the new movement.

This brings us to my second point, namely the role of the Jewish law as the most visible marker of Jewish particularism. Here the convergence between Paul and the Qur’an is most remarkable, given their very different starting points. For his part, Paul has two core concerns that bring him into collision with the Jewish law. Like all Jesus-followers, he must account for how the messiah’s shameful crucifixion and death as an outlaw fit into the economy of salvation, and in terms of his specific mission, he is deeply committed to the idea that Gentiles share in the messianic reality precisely as Gentiles—not as converts to Judaism. In Galatians, that leads him to identify the law as a curse (3:10-14) and a form of slavery (4:22-5:1) and to joke darkly that anyone who is interested in circumcision “would castrate themselves” (5:12). In the later epistle to the Romans, this view has softened: though the law is “holy and just and good” (7:12), its role is the fundamentally negative one of highlighting the omnipresence of sin. In both letters, then, Paul concludes that one is better off joining Christ outside the sphere of the law.

For the Qur’an, the conflict arises from a repeated concern that people should not simply make up prohibitions that God has not actually revealed. In the case of dietary restrictions, the Qur’an repeatedly states that God “has only forbidden you carrion, blood, pig’s meat, and animals over which any name other than God’s has been invoked” (2:173). This raises the question of whether the Torah’s much more restrictive dietary rules represent the kind of imposture that the Qur’an decries. Though the Qur’an is generally comfortable performing a line-item veto of individual laws or plot points from biblical stories, disqualifying the majority of Jewish practice as a fraud is apparently a bridge too far. It decides that the restrictions are real, but they apply only to the Jews, as a form of punishment: “For the wrongdoings done by the Jews, we forbade them certain good things that had been permitted to them before” (4:160). The Qur’an also suggests that the Sabbath may have a similar punitive origin, claiming that “The Sabbath was made obligatory only for those who differed about it” (16:124).

For both the radical messianist and the Seal of the Prophets, then, the Jewish law is reversed from a blessing to a curse, or at least from a privilege to a burden. This obviously complicates my third point of comparison, the ultimate fate of the Jewish people, which is also the place where their strategy most differs. The key passage here in Paul is the labyrinthine Romans 9-11. On the one hand, Paul is unequivocal that “gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable” (Romans 11:29). Jesus is and always remains the Jewish messiah, and his death and resurrection make possible the unexpected extension to all nations of God’s promises to the Jewish people. Even the fact that they have rejected the messiah and become “enemies for your sake” (11:28) only highlights the Jews’ special role in the economy of salvation—they had to step aside temporarily in order to make room for Gentiles to come in. Yet Jewish particularism is only redeemed through accepting Christian particularism, as their jealousy at seeing the Gentiles enjoy the benefit of God’s promises will lead them to relent and accept that Jesus is the messiah (11:11). Only in that sense can Paul say, “all Israel will be saved” (11:26).

By contrast, in the Qur’an, the standards for the salvation of a Jewish person are the same as for anyone else: believe in God and the last day, pray, and live a righteous life. The prophetic message provides no information about what happens if they don’t fulfill their special dietary obligations, though it does include an enigmatic story in which God tests the Jews’ faithfulness by sending them a fish that surfaced only on the Sabbath (7:163-167). They give into temptation, leading God to declare that “until the Day of Resurrection, He would send people against them to inflict terrible suffering on them” (7:167) — a dire punishment, to be sure, but one that only applies to the life of this world. One assumes, as with every commandment in the Qur’an, that the faithful Jew’s duty is to do their best to obey their extra commandments and not be too hard on themselves if some necessity or misunderstanding prevents them. The displacement of Jewish privilege thus leads to a situation where they have no particular advantage or disadvantage in salvation. Indeed, the Qur’an, in a distant echo of Paul’s rude comment from Galatians, can sometimes taunt Jews who believe that their special relationship to God means they are automatically saved that they should therefore wish for death (62:6).

Nevertheless, this live-and-let-live attitude does not exclude a bitter enmity, at least for a certain subset of Jews. The direct cause here is the fact that some Jewish groups explicitly submitted to Muhammad’s leadership through the so-called “Constitution of Medina,” then failed to fulfill their obligations. As Juan Cole is at pains to clarify, many verses that seem to vent fury at the Jews as a whole should instead be interpreted as applying only to specific groups who behave in the specific ways described. That contextualization is helpful, yet it does not dispel my impression that the Qur’an’s attitude toward the Jews is on something of a hair trigger—their presumed favor and cooperation is especially coveted, making their opposition all the more galling. The fact that Christians, who on the face of it violate the Qur’an’s radical monotheism, do not face the same love-hate dynamic only heightens this suspicion. That may simply be a result of a lower or less unified Christian population in the Hijaz — or it may reflect a sense that Christians, as another post-Jewish monotheistic movement, are more natural allies.

III.

Overall, then, both the Apostle Paul and the Prophet Muhammad arrive at very similar strategies for negotiating their relationship with the original bearers of the monotheistic message. Both tend to displace Jewish particularism and replace it with their new movement’s own particularism. Both reinterpret the Jewish law as a burden or punishment rather than a sign of God’s blessing. Thankfully, these negative moves do not lead either to exclude the Jews from salvation, but both nonetheless insist that any redemption they experience will conform to the standards of their new revelation—which was of course the true meaning of the old revelation all along. The specific theological paths they take to get there differ based on their respective historical contexts and emotional investment in the Jewish community, but the fact that such different starting points can lead to such similar results is, at the very least, unexpected—especially for two texts that the medieval and modern scholarly traditions have taken to be completely unrelated.

My contention is that this convergence ultimately stems from the very nature of historical, revealed monotheism. Here I am drawing on the work of Jan Assmann. In The Price of Monotheism, Assmann argues that revealed monotheistic traditions represent “secondary” religions. Whereas the “primary” traditions, retrospectively called polytheism, have an open-ended and inclusive quality — new gods can always be added to the pantheon, and the gods of other groups can be “translated” into their local equivalents—the secondary religions style themselves as the correction of the errors of paganism and have a built-in intolerance. This intolerance extends not only to the unwashed masses outside the monotheistic circle, but to the backsliders and compromisers within it, who fall short of the monotheistic demand encapsulated in a scriptural deposit. Living traditions will inevitably lapse into such “betrayals,” and they will just as inevitably be met with Reformation-like demands to “return” to the pure religion represented in scripture.

All of this seems to me to be basically right, and classroom use has showed me that students find Assmann’s concepts helpful for negotiating the differences between polytheistic and monotheistic traditions. Where Assmann seems to me to stumble is in his account of the relationships among the existing monotheistic traditions, which for him grows out of the tensions between universalism and particularism in the monotheistic idea. On the one hand, monotheism has universal implications—the God it reveals is the God of everyone. On the other hand, monotheism insists on particularity—the God is reveals is a particular named God who has participated in specific historical events, and all other gods are false and/or demonic. Judaism manages this tension in a straightforward way:

In Judaism, the universalism inherent to monotheism is deferred until a messianic end-time; in the world as we know it, the Jews are the guardians of a truth that concerns everyone, but that has been entrusted to them for the time being as to a kind of spiritual avant-garde. For Christians, of course, this end-time dawned some two thousand years ago, putting an end to the need for such distinctions. That is why Christian theology has blinded itself to the need for such distinctions. (17)

He then adds, almost as an afterthought, that Islam suffers from a similar blindness, which is why both traditions have at times embraced an intolerance and violence that seems to contradict their universal message.

This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t seem to provide much explanation for why so much of that intolerance and violence has been directed at a group that both traditions agree to be fellow worshippers of the one true God: namely, the Jews. Here the problem doesn’t seem to me that Christianity and Islam can’t admit that their universal message is rooted in particularism. It’s that they can’t admit that their new revelation is new. This is not merely bad faith or willful blindness, but a structural necessity of participating in the revealed monotheistic tradition. The one true God is not a vague philosophical principle of unity or a trans-historical ideal that may be reflected in many different ways — he is a particular, named deity who has reportedly done particular things at particular times and places. The claim to follow this God therefore requires maintaining some form of continuity with the existing deposit of revelation, even as the felt demand for a new approach demands some critical distance.

The ideal outcome from the perspective of a budding new prophet would of course be that the Jews accept the new “purified” version of monotheism en masse. Every new monotheistic movement seems to include a moment of delusional optimism that this will occur — even Martin Luther expected that Jews would rush to embrace the “real” Christianity that had been obscured for so many centuries. This blessed outcome somehow never occurs, leading to the kinds of mental gymnastics I have documented above.

The necessarily polemical nature of revealed monotheism is therefore directed precisely at the original bearers of the monotheistic demand. Their very faithfulness to the divine command is recast as a form of stubbornness or arrogance. Their entire history — here drawing on authentic threads in the Hebrew Bible — is interpreted as one of rebellion and disbelief. In the Qur’an, which proclaims to the Jews that God has “blessed you and favored you over other people” (2:47), the chosen nation is reduced to a perpetual object lesson for the believers. Even worse, the Christian tradition of typological exegesis that finds its beginning in the Pauline epistles reads the entire history of Israel as a series of unwitting anticipatory pantomimes of the life of Christ.

The Jews are wrong, yet necessary, indeed necessarily wrong. They become, in Paul’s words, “enemies for your sake,” constitutive enemies at the foundation of a new tradition that can structurally never understand itself to be new. And so the new revelation’s declaration that the Jews’ special favor with God, represented by the divine law that structures their lives and sets them apart from all nations, is actually a burden and a curse becomes a grim self-fulfilling prophecy. For the crime of bringing revealed monotheism into the world and sustaining its demand against all odds, the Jews are condemned to perpetual suspicion, exclusion, and persecution—precisely by their fellow monotheists. The dynamic may be more virulent (as in Christianity) or less (as in Islam), but it is nonetheless real and destructive.

I began this paper by considering the understandable reasons that scholars have ignored the possible connection between Paul and the Qur’an, and I will end by asking why Assmann might downplay the toxic theological dynamic that my comparison has highlighed. The answer, it seems to me, is that he is attempting to extract some redemptive core to the monotheistic revolution, which will allow him to declare it, despite everything, a progressive step toward the inclusive secular world order he is clearly hoping for. That core, he claims, is the universal demand for justice, which could form the basis of a universal law, though never a universal religion. Yet the dynamics I trace in this paper call the justice of God deeply into question, as an entire nation’s history is reduced to an object lesson or a ladder to truth that can be safely kicked away. It is no mistake that Romans 9-11, where Paul grapples with the salvation of the Jews, is also Christian theology’s locus classicus for the doctrine of predestination, which seems to reduce God to an arbitrary monster. The hope for a universal justice is surely a valid one, but to get there, we need to break more definitively with the habits of thought that the secondary monotheisms have bequeathed to us.

Jacob in the Bible and Abraham in the Qur’an

A question that might occur to the reader of the Hebrew Bible is why exactly Jacob, who becomes the namesake of the nation of Israel and father of the twelve tribes, is portrayed in such a negative light — scheming, manipulative, always striving for advantage. My dear friend Bruce Rosenstock, who sadly passed away recently, once gave what must be the right answer: somebody has to want it. Every other character in Genesis simply hears and obeys, but Jacob alone actively seeks out the blessing. The fact that he does so in morally questionable ways only reinforces the point.

Teaching my class on the Qur’an, I was recently thinking related thoughts about the figure of Abraham. This is not to say that the Qur’an portrays Abraham as morally ambiguous — that would be completely contrary to the theological goals of its appropriation of the biblical heritage. Instead, Abraham seems to be portrayed as a kind of meeting place between reason and revelation. He doesn’t fight and scheme to get God’s blessing, but he does “independently” want it, because he reasons his way to it before God explicitly reveals himself.

In the Bible, Abraham simply receives the commandment to leave his family and country and obeys. The Qur’an gives us many more episodes (reminiscent of rabbinic traditions in some cases) from Abraham’s youth and his conflicts with his family’s idol-worshipping ways. One key episode is found in Sura 6 (Livestock):

Remember when Abraham said to his father, Azar, “How can you take idols as gods? I see that you and your people have clearly gone astray.” In this way We showed Abraham [God’s] mighty dominion over the heavens and the earth, so that he might be a firm believer. When the night grew dark over him he saw a star and said, “This is my Lord,” but when it set, he said, “I do not like things that set.” And when he saw the moon rising he said, “This is my Lord,” but when it set, he said, “If my Lord does not guide me, I shall be one of those who go astray.” Then he saw the sun rising and cried, “This is my Lord! This is greater.” But when the sun set, he said, “My people, I disown all that you worship beside God. I have turned my face as a true believer towards Him who created the heavens and the earth. I am not one of the polytheists.” (Qur’an 6:74-79, Haleem trans.)

This is a systematic, almost “scientific” investigation — Abraham turns to successively greater heavenly bodies, eliminating each in turn as limited and concluding (albeit with a bit of a logical leap from our perspective) that there must be something even bigger beyond them all. Here I detect a distant echo of this sequence in another text I frequently teach, ibn Tufayl’s Hayy ibn Yaqzan, where the study of astronomy becomes a crucial step in the title character’s journey to God.

Abraham’s logical bent is also seen in a story from 21:51-70, wherein he smashes idols and claims that the gods were fighting among themselves — forcing the idolaters to admit that idols can neither act nor speak. But the most crucial moment is in the Qur’an’s reworking of the sacrifice of Isaac– which may in this case be the sacrifice of Ishmael, the legendary ancestor of the Arabs:

When the boy was old enough to work with his father, Abraham said, “My son, I have seen myself sacrificing you in a dream. What do you think?” He said, “Father, do as you are commanded and, God willing, you will find me steadfast. When they had both submitted to God, and he had laid his son down on the side of his face, We called out to him, “Abraham, you have fulfilled the dream.” This is how We reward those who do good—it was a test to prove [their true characters]—We ransomed his son with a momentous sacrifice, and We let him be praised by succeeding generations. (37:102-109, Haleem trans.)

Crucial here is the fact that his unnamed son is an adult and that the two reason through the revelation together before concluding it must be real and agreeing to follow through with it. I can’t help but think of the hadith stories about Muhammad’s much less measured early reactions to his revelations — which were much less distressing than an apparent commandment to sacrifice one’s own son! — and the way that his wife Khadija had to “talk him down” from his fears that they may have been poetic inspirations from demons rather than authentic divine messages.

Qur’anic storytelling is remarkably spare in its use of details, so the fact that any distinctive character trait of Abraham clearly emerges from the stories is a strong signal. In this case, the reasonableness of Abraham fits well with another important feature of Abraham in the Qur’an’s rhetorical economy — the fact that, in an unexpected echo of Paul’s arguments in Galatians and Romans — Sura 2 (The Cow) repeatedly tries to find a way “back behind” the historical revelations of Judaism and Christianity to reconnect with the foundational religion of Abraham. And you can tell this religion is foundational because it is so simple, so reasonable, so free of the accretions of spurious laws, morally ambiguous stories, and challenges to monotheism that mark Islam’s predecessors. Believe in God and the last day, say the prayers, give to the poor — you could almost reason your way to that on your own!

But in another turn of the screw, Abraham also becomes the foundation of Islamic particularism, because the same sura presents Abraham and Ishmael as the builders of the shrine in Mecca. Hence his destruction of his father’s idols becomes a prefiguration of the cleansing of that shrine, which becomes the crowning achievement of Muhammad’s career as a prophet. This is where Abraham and Muhammad cannot finally follow Hayy ibn Yaqzan. The monotheistic demand, despite its universal claim on human reason, is always already embedded in a particular history — and that history is always one of failure and betrayal, which the supposed reasonableness and self-evidence of the revelation only serves to throw into starker relief.