Mona Siddiqui, a professor at Edinburgh University’s school of divinity, makes no secret of the various strains of thought that inform her study of Christians, Muslims and Jesus. Parts of her book are rigorously academic and arcane, other parts are very personal. Unlike Mr Aslan, she does not confine her meditations on her own faith to an introduction. Rather, she ambitiously weaves her personal and scholarly views throughout.
She presents certain basic facts: Muslims revere Jesus as a uniquely inspired prophet who was born of the Virgin Mary, ascended to heaven and will come again. Yet Muslims cannot accept that Jesus was the son of God. This, they believe, reflects a flawed view of both Jesus and God. As Ms Siddiqui shows, Christians and Muslims sparred with one another intensely during the early centuries after Islam’s rise, with each side vying to be the ultimate revelation of God. But the two faiths did at least grudgingly acknowledge one another as monotheistic, despite Islam’s firm rejection of the Christian view of God as a trinity: Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
I don’t agree with this reviewer’s statement that “the two faiths did at least grudgingly acknowledge one another as monotheistic.” This ignores the early caliph’s invitation to the Emperor in Constantinople, when the Arabs first attempted to conquer it, to leave his idolatry (Christianity) and worship the one God. It ignores the clear teaching of classical Islam (and of conservative Islam today) that Christians commit “shirk,” idolatry, when they worship Jesus as God. They teach that Christians worship three deities, not one.
Katherine is absolutely correct. Most Muslims consider Christians to be polytheists.