Islam I

An Appreciation

You can read Part II here.

In last week’s appreciation, I talked about my love of Judaism. It had originally been my plan to go through the world’s traditions in the order of my affections for them, and how they have come to matter to me in my personal history of faith, but it seemed to me in the aftermath of that piece that to pass from Judaism immediately to Hinduism (my third intellectual and aesthetic home among the world’s religions) would be thematically odd. After all, I ended my piece on Judaism by talking about how despite my deep affection for it, the prospect of leaving Jesus at the door to become a Jew was something I could not do, quite aside from any arguments for or against Christian claims about Jesus. But Islam represents an alternative Abrahamic religiosity which also offers Jesus, which also offers universalistic impulses of membership, and which is also, importantly, engaged with other, non-Abrahamic worlds, sometimes much more seriously than either Judaism or Christianity ever have been. So it seems important to register appreciation for Islam next. In Judaism, Christians look at a mainstream continuity from which their tradition diverges; in Islam, they see a similar alternative trajectory from their own path, realizing certain possibilities inherent in their own model in a new way.