Warning: If you are offended by icons of Muhammad, you may not want to click “Read more”.
I’ve talked about iconoclasm in Islam briefly a few months ago and recently stumbled upon an icon of Muhammad that most modern day Iranian Shi’as have in their homes. I found the similarities between this and an Orthodox icon of Christ Pantocrator striking. The photo to the left is an icon from St. Catherine’s monastery in Sinai from the 6th-7th century.
Guest post written by Seraphim Hamilton:
In Response to a Question. Why be a Christian? What persuades me of Christianity?
This is a big question, and you definitely have my prayers…but let me give you a few “big picture” reasons for my belief in Christianity.
1. I find the narrative presented by Christianity to be extremely compelling. Remember that the Christian faith is not first and foremost a set of dogmas. It is a way of viewing the world, of telling the human story. And in the Christian account, we talk about humanity spiraling deep into sin, after which God chooses one, small family through which he blesses the whole world. So look at the history of the Near East. You’ve got kingdoms and empires rising and falling. And in the midst of this, you’ve got one little kingdom, Israel. Not particularly powerful. Spends a lot of time as a vassal state. Ends up getting kicked out of their land and then coming back in subjugation to a series of other empires. But the whole way through, Israel is saying “one day, all nations will worship our God.” No other nation is saying this. Tiglath-Pileser is not saying this about the gods of Assyria. Nebuchadnezzar is not saying this about the gods of Babylon. Cyrus is not saying this about the gods of Persia. But the Israelites are saying it about their God.
Many Muslims claim that the Qur’an contains scientific information that could not have been known during the time that it was written and, as a result of this, believe that the Qur’an must be divine revelation. Here I will address some of the more common “scientific miracle” verses of the Qur’an that are presented in this leaflet. I will attempt to demonstrate that these verses are often either drawn from the Bible or misinterpreted to seem as though they contain some sort of miraculous scientific knowledge.
Whether or not Yazid issued an iconoclastic edict in 721 AD has been debated among scholars, but I find the current state of Islam (and accounts of those in Muslim territory at the time) to be quite telling and fascinating.
It is interesting to note the various traditions concerning icons in Islamic history. Omid Safi, an Iranian-American professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, in his book Memories of Muhammad notes that his own Islamic tradition, Iranian Shi’a Islam, is very iconophilic. He even includes icons of Muhammad in his book and the distraught reactions of his Sunni friends upon being told what they were looking at was an icon of their Prophet. While one may then think the iconophilic attitude is uniquely Shi’a, that would be incorrect—Arab Shi’as are just as strongly iconoclastic as their Sunni counterparts. Safi also mentions, along with Judith Herrin in her book Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medeival Empire, the fact that Muhammad, when destroying all the idols in the Ka’ba, left the icons of Christ and the Virgin Mary untouched—an interesting Islamic reaction that would not have been the case during the time of Yazid II.
The edict of Yazid II back in 721 AD, mainly influential among Arab-Muslims, might explain this strange and interesting variety concerning icons in Islamic history.
The doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation have, understandably, been a stumbling block to most Muslims who have only ever understood God as one in essence and person. While many assume this sort of absolute monotheism is the norm among monotheistic faiths, it actually has not been—modern Judaism and Islam are the only two faiths that emphasize absolute monotheism.
My upcoming series on monotheism is going to address these issues more in depth, but I will touch upon them a bit here and then get into what the Incarnation actually means.
Islam Meets Orthodoxy 