The Abrahamic faith group – Jews, Christians, and Muslims – otherwise known as People of the Book by Muslims of fellow Jews and Christians, is recognized as a special relationship among members of this monotheistic faith group. This affinity of faith is being fractured in so many ways and is about to unravel into chaos and mayhem for the world and the people in it unless the members of this group proactively face the situation, reassess their world views, and realign their relationship with one another.
As the Qur’an said, they (Jews and Christians) read their scriptures but follow very little of it. It can also be applied to Muslims, how we read the Qur’an and abuse our fellow believers and others.
This critical and much needed reassessment needs to be grounded on several basic truths, facts, and orientations. Let me state some of these:
- Unconditional belief in One God and full submission to God’ s Will as expressed through divine revelations to Moses, to Jesus, and to Mohammad and other prophets of antiquity
- There is no compulsion in matters of faith, and all religions should be allowed to flourish without hindrance from anyone, in any land and under any form of communal arrangement or governance
- Equality of every human being must be guaranteed irrespective of color, creed, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender, and any other innate attributes over which a person has no or little control
- No human being should be made to suffer for their life, liberty, or pursuit of their own dream
- All societies should strive to be founded on truth and justice for everyone, without any differentiation
- Justice should be assessed through the lens of truth, and truth should be assessed through the lens of justice, while being generously empathetic, forgiving, and patient with one another, regardless of who they are
- Our planet is a gift and not owned by us, and we must behave as responsible guests so that we leave it in no worse shape than we find it
- Individual and collective accountability and return to God is as certain as natural laws
- Every action will result in a reaction – such a reaction can be delayed or temporarily withheld by coercion or injustice, but can never be avoided or averted, as God said – to Us is your return and it is on Us is call you to account!
These principles are reflected across the core teachings of each tradition: the Ten Commandments in the Torah, Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, and the Prophet Muhammad’s Farewell Sermon. Together with the broader scriptures and lived examples of believers, they offer practical guidance for ethical living. At the same time, each tradition must grapple with its own internal challenges.
Judaism’s paranoia about favored status and land rights have long caused numerous schisms among Jews and resulted in an overly materialistic orientation, as a means of protection, and has led to the marginalization of God and good work as the true sources of protection. Such paranoia justifies any means, however questionable, to secure that elusive sense of safety, ignoring the fact that lasting security comes from goodness and not from convenient and ill-justified evil acts – financial, military, or otherwise.
Christianity’s generous doling out of salvation purely based on faith in Jesus (less so on good works) has eaten away at the very fabric of accountability and created this insatiable appetite to save others who are non-Christian or those Christians who might understand their Christianity differently than their own brand of Christianity. The level of intolerance exhibited during the Crusades, Inquisition, rivalry of Catholics vs. Protestants, colonial exploits, the slavery of Africans, the ethnic cleansing of indigenous people, holocaust, World War I and II are stark reminders of their colossal failures, even though some Evangelicals feel these the hallmark of their success. The succession of takeovers of Christianity by the Pope and the Roman Emperor, The king of England, by the European Protestant and now by the American Evangelical has turned Christianity into a European and Western construct devoid of its Eastern Origin, even to the point of deafness and blindness to the desecration and destruction of Jesus’s own birthplace and church in Nazareth and Bethlehem – a real life drama that is being played out in real time with modern technology and social media.
The Muslims have not failed in their theology of faith in One God or the rituals of their faith, which most Muslims follow with remarkable clarity and consensus. The failure of the Muslims is much more nuanced after a thousand years of progressive enlightenment, mass education, guaranteeing women’s rights ahead of its time, and unprecedented contribution to science, medicine, and social justice and rule of law in peacetime as well as in conflict. Blamed on the overwhelming weight of colonial hegemony by European Christians, the Muslim countries had failed to reinvigorate mass education, restore truth and justice for everyone, reassess the rule of law based on the Qur’anic principles, rather than blind faith or blind negligence of existing religious laws, and blindly adopt leftover laws, economic constructs, and social customs from colonial days.
We all are failing – the grandchildren of Abraham, who fought to remove all vestiges of idol worship and superstition, was ready to sacrifice his son, rebuilt the first house of worship that all Muslims turn to daily, who is buried under the dome of rock, not far from the burial places of Jesus and Moses. Instead of counterclaims of whether he was a Jew or a Christian, we need to focus on his total submission to God’s will and reorient us to the true calls from Moses, Jesus, and Mohammad – which is of pure monotheism, being thankful to God, being responsible to fellow human beings, and preserving the natural world and the natural order of things. This is the unified higher calling that we can pursue while being in our respective lanes of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. As God said, “For every group (of people) We (God) have allowed different rules and different ways of life (as they opted for). If God had willed, He could have made all into a single community, but He wanted to test each group in what they find themselves. Therefore, compete for goodness. To God all of you will return, and He will then inform you in all that you were differing.” (5:48)
