Islam’s Retcon of Jewish Monotheism
How the security blanket of the conquered became the mascot of conquerors
Alienation is the leitmotif of monotheism. The exclusive deity that would live the longest in the human imagination, in its three guises in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was born in Jewish angst.
Only traces of that initial aloofness remain in Christianity, as the hidden God that channeled Jewish resentment towards the human world that kept humiliating the Jewish people was tossed into a Hellenistic witch’s brew that included Greco-Roman savior gods. The transcendent stickler became a mortal man, lowly, outcast, and crucified enough to satisfy the Jewish expectation that the divine protagonist should favour the have-nots.
But the Christian narrative emphasizes that Jesus was a mere man, that is, an immanent, natural construct rather than an inaccessible, supernatural entity. So that side of the gospel departed from Judaism and made peace with the fact that Christian communities would go on to inherit the power and the amoral machinations of the Roman Empire. Christianity brought God down to Earth to celebrate the naturalness of the Church’s earthly tyrannies.
How, then, would Islam handle this theme of alienation?
