Mustafa Akyol
Mustafa Akyol
At a time of bitter conflict in the Middle East, The Islamic Moses dives into the older, deeper, and often unexpectedly brighter story of Jews and Muslims.
Today, I am glad to announce the release of my latest book,
The Islamic Moses: How the Prophet Inspired Jews and Muslims to Flourish Together and Change the World (St. Martin’s Press, 2024)
It is, in a sense, a sequel to my earlier book, The Islamic Jesus (2017), which examined the Qur’anic depiction of Jesus Christ, revealing the intricate connections between Christianity and Islam. This time, I examine the Quranic depiction of Moses, who, curiously, is the most dominant human figure in the Islamic scripture, eclipsing even the latter’s own prophet, Muhammad.
The Quranic Moses is just the key to a much larger story, though. The Jewish prophet was so central to Islam’s founding text because he was the role model for Islam’s own prophet. Muhammad embraced the core ideals of Judaism — a staunch monotheism with a comprehensive religious law — only to proclaim them to his people, the Arabs. The theological continuation between two faiths was so strong that modern Jewish historian Shelomo Dov Goitein (d. 1985) defined Islam as “from the very flesh and bone of Judaism.” This new religion, Goitein added, was “a recast, an enlargement” of its Jewish precursor.
For many people in the West today, all this may be surprising to hear, because they are used to hearing about the “Judeo-Christian tradition,” while Islam is often considered, at best, a distant cousin. But the Judeo-Christian tradition is a modern concept popularized only in the twentieth century, when Western civilization finally began to question its dark history of antisemitism, while parts of the Muslim world sadly began to absorb it.
However, there is an equally valid “Judeo-Islamic tradition” — as historian Bernard Lewis once called it — that encompasses both the striking religious parallels between Judaism and Islam, » Read More
https://www.cato.org/blog/islamic-moses-key-judeo-islamic-tradition