God in the Qur'an

Jack Miles regularly writes about God and other biblical figures, primarily as literary characters. His God: A Biography (1995), won  a Pulitzer Prize, and Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God (2001), was named a New York Times Notable Book. Now, he has applied his technique to Islam’s scripture, insofar as so many of the familiar figures from the biblical narratives also appear there. Describing himself "a practicing Episcopalian," Miles acknowledges his starting point as a Christian , who nonetheless approaches the Qur'an "as a literary critic." “We must all learn,” he writes, “to read one another’s scriptures, be they secular or sacred, with the same understanding and accommodating eye that we turn upon our own.” 

The author focuses on biblical characters familiar to Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike: Adam and Eve (known in the Qur'an only as Adam's wife), Cain and Abel (known as Adam's son and his brother), Noah, Abraham (and his father and his sons), Joseph, Moses, and Jesus and his Mother, all of whom appear recognizably in the Qur’an, but whose stories are in important ways also somewhat different from how they appear in the comparable Jewish and Christian accounts of them (canonical and apocryphal). "How," he asks, does the Qur'an expand upon, contract, or revise the Bible's account of a given biblical character or episode?" He is particularly interested in how Allah, as he speaks in the Qur'an, "explicitly corrects what Muhammad may have heard from Jewish or Christian sources."

One important difference Miles notes is that in the Qur’an God (Allah) speaks as the narrator, which is very different from most of the biblical stories we are already so familiar with, which are narrated largely by effectively anonymous authors. Allah as direct narrator imparts to the characters and the stories about them a distinctive dimension, which also reflects Islam's emphasis on acknowledging Allah - and Allah alone - as God of all creation. "What Allah, as the author and the speaker of the Qur'an, therefore requires of Jews and Christians is that they should acknowledge that they have lost or adulterated what God revealed to them." By observing how the Qur'an revises what it shares with the Bible, "an observant interpreter may infer how differently the Qur'an characterizes God."

Unlike the biblical account, the Qur'an's account of Adam and Eve incorporates important information about the angels and Satan, material  familiar to many Christians but not from the Bible. (Unlike the biblical authors, Muhammad, of course, would likely have had access to such post-biblical apocryphal stories.) Also unlike the Bible, the Qur'an account also does not portray Adam and Eve's efforts to evade responsibility. Rather they confess and repent and receive Allah's mercy. "Adam, by his humble repentance, becomes the first Muslim."

Likewise, unlike the biblical Noah, the Qur'an's Noah is more like a prophet, God's messenger to his idolatrous contemporaries. Noah anticipates already the self-understanding in both Christianity and Islam of not being about natural family but rather an intentional commitment - in the one case to Christ, in the other to Allah and to Muhammad as his messenger. This theme is reinforced in the account of Abraham's relationship with his father, making him "the truly paradigmatic Muslim not just in his maturity but even in his youth." Highlighting this theme, common to Christianity as well, Miles notes: "Faith can hold families together. It can also tear them apart." Like the new Testament Jesus, the Qur'an's Abraham is "subordinating familial to creedal values."

So too, in contrast to the Exodus story, in the Qur'an "the Egyptians's core offense is that they do not worship the one true God." Unlike God in Exodus, "Allah wants Egypt, and even Pharaoh himself to convert." Indeed, when drowning in the Red Sea, Pharaoh in the Qur'an does exactly that, saying, "I believe that there is no god except Him in Whom the children of Israel believe, and I am a Muslim."

One of the few things about the Qur'an that Christians are likely to know is that Mary, the Mother of Jesus, is much more prominent there than in the New Testament. In fact, she is the only woman named in the Qur'an, which emphasizes her holiness. The Qur'an, of course, denies divinity to Jesus and, in what Miles calls "a kind of proto-Protestant radicalism" also denies divinity to Mary. Whereas the Gospels emphasize Jesus' Davidic descent (through Joseph, who does not appear at all in the Qur'an), that plays no part in the Qur'an account. "What matters is that Jesus is a Muslim who has received his own 'book" from Allah himself and indeed while still in his cradle." Finally, the Qur'ann portrays Jesus as Allah's prophet rejected by is contemporaries, as earlier prophets had been, but Jesus' death is accorded no salvific significance.

What is this book's greatest value? Miles believes that "the very  experience of imagining yourself thinking and living in another way will foster in you, out of transferred self-love, a measure of sympathy. ... Imagine yourself as other than you are and you begin imagining others as no less human, no less sincere, no less levelheaded, no less likable than you are yourself."