§1: Samaritans, Jews, and Christians are together the children of Abraham through Isaac, while the Islamic ummah, and, arguably, some of its offshoots in various subsidiary communities to which Islam has given rise, are the children of Abraham through Ishmael. I take for granted in this differentiation of Abraham’s children—the appropriate designation, quite apart from the question of a historical Abraham1—that the god of Abraham actively wills the existence of these varied communities, and that each of them is the heir of something unique, distinctive, and as Paul J. Griffiths would put it, “intimate” with the deity, which is the god’s gift: and that this may be true even while, exoterically, they contradict one another in a variety of liturgical and doctrinal matters.
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