Between Muslim and Jew

"Well if you were to phrase that “Jews and Muslims,” that would be absolutely true. One of the things that comes out of Boyarin’s book is precisely the vast difference between Christianity, which can say “render under to Caesar…” and separate church and state, and Judaism and Islam where there is no such conception. And that’s really the fundamental thing. Those divisions don’t exist. There’s no word for religion in traditional Jewish language at all. And that’s something shared by Islam. The head of the state is the defender of the faithful. Wasserstrom is talking about some remarkable parallel developments between Muslims and Jews in the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries—one of which is an attempt by the Persians to reassert their cultural independence in the face of the domination of Mecca, Damascus and then Baghdad. This attempt takes the form of religious dissent, so it’s not accidental that the centre of Shiism is Persia. But at the same time that Shiism was arriving, which was frequently Messianic, there were Messianic movements amongst the Jews, one of which lasted four or five centuries. The name of the Messiah in question was “Abu Isa”, which means “Father of Jesus.” It’s hard to get at his message because it was only recorded by people who didn’t like him, but he seems to have preached a tolerant or even a synchronistic approach to religion. But it’s all resisting the centralising efforts of the Rabbis who want to unify and homogenise Rabbinic Judaism. There’s all kinds of resistance to that attempt. Well no. You’re getting too Jungian for me there. No, it’s not the sort of language that I feel comfortable with. What’s happening here is that religious language is being used—because I’m sociological, as you’ve correctly pointed out—religious language is being used to mask other kinds of resentment and resistance. And what’s striking is that the Muslim dissenters, the Shiites and so on, are rejecting the oral traditions of the Sunni, of the orthodox Muslims. And the Jewish dissenters are rejecting the orthodox traditions of the Rabbis. What’s more this Abu Isa I was talking about was represented as an illiterate. Now the idea of an illiterate Jewish Messiah is just unthinkable unless you accept the traditional biography of the Prophet. Mohammad is said to have been unlettered; that he was simply a vessel through which God’s voice was transmitted … People memorised what he said and then it was written down in the Koran about a generation later."