Letter for Week 1
View more in The Global Church and Islam
The last two verses of Chapter, or Sura, 85 of the Qur’an relate:
21. In fact, it is a Glorious Quran.
22. In a Preserved Tablet.
This passage helps form the foundation of a common Muslim belief that the Qur’an is more than an inspired book. Instead it is an eternal, heavenly book, brought down from a “preserved tablet.” This notion of the Qur’an as a heavenly book is a good starting point for a comparative study of Islam and Christianity more generally, the task before us over the next three weeks in our course “The Church and Islam.”
Muslims believe that God spoke to prophets throughout history, beginning with Adam and including Jesus (and other major Biblical figures such as Noah, Abraham, and Moses). However, there was one more prophet to come after Jesus: Muhammad. Between the years AD 610 and 632, in the Arabian cities of Mecca and Medina, Muhammad proclaimed the Qur’an: a collection messages that he understood to be the very words of God given to him by the angel Gabriel.
In week 1 of our Church and Islam course, we will discover that the Qur’an does not break radically from Jewish and Christian tradition. Instead, it features Biblical characters and retells Biblical stories. In addition to watching the videos below, you might learn more about this theme through this article, and this episode of the Notre Dame podcast Minding Scripture. From an academic perspective, the Qur’an offers an interesting vision of the religious world of the late antique Middle East, where Christians and Jews were advancing claims about God and scripture. The Qur’an is a new voice to this debate and advances its own claims.
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