A fascinating bridge text between Islam and Christianity.
Intriguing exploration of the Muslim understanding of Jesus.
Akyol (Islam Without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty, 2011) provides an open-minded and historically driven look at the Quran’s treatment of Jesus, with an emphasis on how the person of Jesus may have come into the worldview of Muhammad and his followers. Displaying a keen comprehension for the background behind all three Abrahamic religions and a deep understanding of Middle Eastern history, Akyol reviews the place of Jesus in the scope of Islam in a way that few modern writers have, especially outside of purely academic works. After a short discussion on the concept of the “historical Jesus,” he explores the divide between the theology developed by Paul, which became Christianity, broadly understood, and that developed by James and the church in Jerusalem, which became “Jewish Christianity,” a sect that eventually died out. The author goes on to share the intriguing similarities between the theology of Jewish Christians and the Quran’s theological concept of Jesus. In a pivotal chapter, the author provides a variety of recognized theories (and some archaeological evidence) for a real, historical connection between the vanishing Jewish Christians and the first followers of Islam. Nowhere does Akyol suggest that any one theory is definitive, but he certainly leaves readers with food for thought. He continues by exploring the role Jesus plays in the Quran, especially in contrast to his role in Christianity. In reviewing Quranic verses on Jesus, the author reveals that in many cases, parallel or at least related statements are made in apocryphal Christian literature. Among many other examples, the Quran claims that Jesus breathed life into clay birds, a statement highly reminiscent of a similar tale in a work of Christian Apocrypha, The Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Ultimately, Akyol finds that Jesus provides Muslims with a worthy exemplar of piety and holiness and that the overtones of history and geopolitics need not dampen that fact.
A fascinating bridge text between Islam and Christianity.Pub Date: Feb. 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-08869-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Children's author Grimes (From a Child's Heart, 1993, etc.) does an adult turn with this mild historical fiction about the mother of Jesus. Largely narrated in the first person, the novel tells the familiar story of Mary in a simple, pious way that is sure to please fundamentalist believers. Coming of age in the backwater of Galilee, ruled by the evil and tyrannical puppet-king Herod, Mary is attracted to the carpenter, Joseph, by his muscular good looks and his love of God. She is betrothed to him when she is visited by the Archangel Gabriel, who announces that she has conceived a child by the spirit of God. She envisions opprobrium and rejection as a result of this ``illegitimate'' pregnancy, but Joseph stands by her and vows to keep the matter private between them. Forced to flee to Egypt to avoid the mass infanticide ordered by Herod, they return only after the monarch's death. Jesus, the son she bears, impresses all those around him, and Mary remembers the promise of Gabriel and the old prophecies, but she still doesn't fully understand. Finally, Jesus embarks on a ministry of which she is no real part. She sees him only occasionally and is confused when he spurns her. She watches helplessly as he is arrested and executed. When he is raised from the dead, in fulfillment of the prophecies, Mary, like Doubting Thomas, refuses to believe it until she has seen it with her own eyes—after which she emerges believing and exultant. Passages from the Gospels punctuate the text and serve to give it a homogenized story line culled from disparate parts of the biblical tradition. Attempts to add resonance to the bare-bones account by portraying Mary's inner thoughts are only sometimes successful. Boy meets girl. Girl gives birth to Messiah. Messiah dies. Messiah lives. Enough said.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-15-173199-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
Michael Lerner has found God, and he wants other alienated progressive Jews to find God, too. Unfortunately, this overlong tome is more likely to put readers to sleep than to awaken them to Jewish spirituality. Who is Lerner's God? ``S/he'' is ``the possibility of possibility,'' that is, the possibility of transformation. Lerner wants to return Judaism to its original revolutionary creed of freedom, equality, and social justice and to its belief that the world must be ``repaired.'' Editor of the progressive journal Tikkun, he convincingly responds to critics who say that Jewish renewal, with its revisions of liturgy and ritual, is inauthentic, by showing how through its history Judaism has undergone a continual process of change. But he is on squishier ground when he draws on psychoanalytic theory. In an almost comical act of biblical interpretation, Lerner explains that Abraham's binding of Isaac for sacrifice was a repetition compulsion, a reenactment of his own father's supposed cruelty to him. Similarly, all oppression and injustice—from slavery to the Holocaust—is reduced to a form of collective neurosis. Lerner's arguments are often philosophically weak; claiming Jews have internalized such ``distortions'' as anti-Semitism, Lerner states that ``it is ludicrous to describe the abandonment of Judaism...as a product of rational choice.'' We are all victims of the past—so much for radical freedom. Contemporary Jews, according to Lerner, have lost touch with the revolutionary message of their religion, instead accommodating to secular, capitalist society. He paints a portrait of the American Jewish community as venal and corrupt. He offers no evidence, but he does have a villain: his favorite bogeyperson, Norman Podhoretz, and other neo-cons. Readers may want to go directly to Part III, a useful discussion of the ways in which Jewish renewal ideas are being expressed in ritual, from nonpatriarchal liturgy to a reappropriation of the Sabbath as an expression of human equality and dignity. Lots of mind-numbing analysis and little inspiration for Jews seeking a religious expression for their political convictions.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13980-X
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1994
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