Jesus in the Islamic imagination

The Living Stream

Jesus was once asked: “Spirit and Word of God, who is the most seditious of men?” He answered, “The scholar who is in error. If a scholar errs, a host of people will fall into error because of him.”

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Jesus said: “At the end of time, there will be religious scholars who preach abstinence but do not themselves abstain, who encourage yearning for the afterlife but do not themselves yearn, who forbid visits to rulers but do not themselves desist, who draw near to the rich and distance themselves from the poor, who recoil from the lowly and fawn upon the mighty. They are the tyrants and the enemies of the Merciful God.”

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One day, Jesus and his disciples passed by a dog’s carcass. The disciples cried, “How foul is his stench!” Jesus said, “How white are his teeth!” He wished to teach them a lesson: slander ought to be avoided.

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When Jesus passed by a town, its inhabitants lamented that their fruit trees had become worm-ridden. He told them, “You can rid this problem yourselves. While planting tree saplings, you fill the pit with the soil first and then pour water to it. This is not the way to do it. You should pour water on the roots of the sapling and then put earth over it. Then the worms cannot destroy the tree.” The people of the town did as they were told and the problem did not appear again.

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The two sayings and the two episodes that I narrate above are found in The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (Harvard University Press, 2001), an exciting anthology compiled, translated and introduced by Tarifi Khalidi, a Palestinian scholar of Islamic and Arabic Studies.

Written by Ibn Al-Mubarak, the eighth century theologian in Iran and Ibn Abd-Rabbihi, a ninth century poet in Spain, respectively, the two sayings attributed to Jesus, Khalidi observes, are among the earliest instances in Islamic thought where religious scholars are asked to serve the community and not the government.

The episode around the dog’s carcass was written by the tenth century Iraqi scholar Ibn Abi al-Dunya. The next episode, which is narrated by Ibn-Babuya, the tenth century Shia jurist, Khalidi writes, is unique: the depiction of Jesus as a farmer reflected a common Muslim view of that age that prophets were “particularly adept at a certain skill.”

Khalidi’s anthology collects over 300 instances of Jesus’s appearance dispersed outside the Quran and the Hadith: in “works of ethics and popular devotion, works of Adab(belles-lettres), works of Sufism or Muslim mysticism, anthologies of wisdom, and histories of prophets and saints” composed between the eighth and the eighteenth centuries.

The Muslim Jesus opens with a Mughal miniature painting of Mary giving birth to Christ under a palm tree whose branches have lowered themselves to bring the dates within her reach. It moves on to offer fascinating images of Jesus seen in Arabic Islamic culture which “greatly revered him but rejected his divinity.” In a decidedly sombre year, it felt exciting, however, to see Jesus being creatively summoned in a rich civilizational conversation with influences flowing from Greece as well as -- in two possible cases -- from “an Indian sage” and “a Buddhist saying.” Consider three among the many tantalising instances.

Viewing Ghuta, a fertile region to the west of Damascus, from a height, Jesus remarks, “O Ghuta, even if the wealthy man is unable to reap a fortune from you, the poor man will not fail to get his fill of bread from you.” Ibn Asakir, a sixth century city historian, Khalidi notes, attributed this remark to Jesus as part of an effort to associate early spiritual figures with his native city and establish its sanctity.

In the writing of Ibn Arabi, the influential thirteenth century Sufi philosopher for whom longing (shawq) played a central part in a human’s relationship to God and to fellow humans, Jesus says: “Conduct yourselves with people in such a manner that while you live they long for you and after you die they weep for you.”

In an account of Al-Turtushi, the twelfth century Andalusian philosopher, Jesus affirms a value prized in pre-Islamic and Islamic -- and, we might add, Indian -- civilisation: “A ruler should not be vicious, since it is to him that mankind looks for self-restraint; nor should he be tyrannical, since it is from him that mankind demands justice.”