"Technically a Form of Christianity"

Julian Baldick's 1993 book Imaginary Muslims treats of the Uwaysi movement in Islam--a fascinating chapter in the history of Muslim pietism. My present interest, however, does not concern the book or the movement it studies but, rather, an interesting series of short observations that Baldick makes on page 3 of his introduction:

"Now Islam recognizes Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, and thus is technically a form of Christianity."

I think this simple observation is both true and profound. Baldick rightly qualifies the foregoing statement with a few more that are equally true and profound:

"However, it sees him [Jesus] as a man and a prophet, not as God incarnate or God's Son. It has no church or priesthood. Instead, there are jurists (in effect rabbis) and Sufi 'elders' (very like the startsy of Russian Orthodox monasticism), who provide advice to the faithful and answer their queries."

In four sentences, Baldick describes the Islamic tradition as a whole through insightful comparisons to Christianity and Judaism, revealing deep kinship and differences.

For Muslims, the Jewish Messiah has come and, no doubt to the disappointment of Jews, identify this individual as Rabbi Jesus. Since one of the primary means of distinguishing Christianity from Judaism is this same identification, Baldick sees no reason to mince words: Islam is "technically" a form of Christianity--no doubt to the consternation of many Christians today. But why should this fact trouble Christians rather than delight them? That is a question that Christians need to answer for themselves.

Of course, part of the reason is that, as a matter of dogma, Christians conflate Jesus' role as Jewish Messiah with his Christian deification and, as is clear from Baldick's follow-up qualification, Muslims reject the latter (as do all good "Jewish" unitarian monotheists) while accepting the former. Christians have become so accustomed to thinking of Messiah-ship and deification as two aspects of a single role that they cannot help but be disturbed when confronted with the fact that 1.5 billion of their "co-religionists" (as it were) dogmatically distinguish the two.

That Muslims manage to get along without "church" or "priesthood" is another source of annoyance to Christians--most of whom have convinced themselves that religion without some form of either is simply inconceivable. 15 centuries of Muslims "doing without," however, would seem to indicate that it is not only conceivable but quite doable.

The comparison of Muslim jurists to Rabbis is not only descriptively accurate but, as much scholarship has demonstrated over the past half century, historically apt: for Islamic and Jewish jurisprudence appear to have "grown up together" during the medieval period.

The comparison of Sufi shaykhs to Russian Orthodox elders is also quite apt--and the cross pollination among such religious personnel is itself a matter of study--although, at this point, remains under-investigated.