Islam’s Retcon of Jewish Monotheism
How the security blanket of the conquered became the mascot of conquerors
Alienation is the leitmotif of monotheism. The exclusive deity that would live the longest in the human imagination, in its three guises in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam was born in Jewish angst.
Only traces of that initial aloofness remain in Christianity, as the hidden God that channeled Jewish resentment towards the human world that kept humiliating the Jewish people was tossed into a Hellenistic witch’s brew that included Greco-Roman savior gods. The transcendent stickler became a mortal man, lowly, outcast, and crucified enough to satisfy the Jewish expectation that the divine protagonist should favour the have-nots.
But the Christian narrative emphasizes that Jesus was a mere man, that is, an immanent, natural construct rather than an inaccessible, supernatural entity. So that side of the gospel departed from Judaism and made peace with the fact that Christian communities would go on to inherit the power and the amoral machinations of the Roman Empire. Christianity brought God down to Earth to celebrate the naturalness of the Church’s earthly tyrannies.
How, then, would Islam handle this theme of alienation?
Islam represented a revival of Jewish purity, a shunning of Christianity’s Greco-Roman detour, and a return to the preoccupation with religious legalism. Muslims developed the barbarism of Sharia to demonstrate their submission to Allah. Like Jews, Muslims emphasized God’s oneness rather than courting pagan approval with the Trinity and the bevy of holy saints.
True, Jews and Muslims had their angels which likewise blurred the line between monotheism and polytheism, but those religions insisted that God “himself” was unfathomable and that he transcended any terrestrial manifestation. By contrast, Christianity identified God’s essence with his incarnation in a man called “Jesus.”
So, Islam returned to the relative clarity of Jewish monotheism, but under very different historical circumstances. After all, Jews were the conquered, whereas Muslims were the conquerors. The question, therefore, is how political winners would make use of a protagonist that spoke originally to the concerns of political losers.
God was supposed to reward the loser eventually, when a messiah would arrive to usher in a divine judgment, a distant Day of the Lord when the wicked conquerors would be punished for abusing God’s chosen people. As Jesus, too, said, the last will be first and the first will be last. In other words, supernatural standards will turn natural norms upside down.
But what need had Muslims of that fantasy of divine vengeance? Didn’t Muslims excel in imposing their wrath on infidels and heathens more directly, by conquering lands in the name of their deity? Jews could only fantasize that Jewish monotheism might be spread by the sword (as in their scriptural depiction of Joshua’s military campaigns), and that God alone would bring about that rightful purification of humanity.
What, then, was the fantasy at play when the Arabs spread Islam far and wide by military conquests, throughout what we still call the Muslim world? Notice there’s no such comparable thing as the “Jewish world,” but only the tiny Jewish country of Israel that’s been propped up by the secular or pseudo-Christian superpower of the United States.
Jews expressed their political marginality by conceiving of a wholly other deity, of a hidden, indeed apparently nonexistent one that was thus capable of ironic twists. For instance, this deity seemed real, after all, in its support for the Jewish people who have managed to survive for millennia despite having been subjugated and persecuted numerous times.
By contrast, Muslims could only celebrate and rationalize their seemingly miraculous earthly victories by emphasizing the tyrannical aspect of the Jewish image of God. Allah wasn’t hidden or estranged from nature or politics, so much as he was a “great,” supreme being to whom we’re all obliged to “submit.”
Jews weren’t interested in submitting so much as in suffering nobly as symbols of a higher righteousness. Even if Jews lost in secular or material terms, they won by staying true to God’s commandments. But Muslims couldn’t suffer in that way since Muslims happened to excel at war. Rather than suffering defeat after defeat, Muslims made others suffer. Thus, the Muslim’s god must justify that imperialism by embodying mainly the inexplicable, Orwellian command to submit, that being the essence of political domination. Submit to Allah as the Arabs would have had you submit to Islam and to the Muslim world.
Allah was the strongest being to whom all weaker beings would naturally submit, if only in the end. For Jews, too, everyone would one day kneel before God, yet Jews emphasized not Yahweh’s power but his wisdom and his righteousness in suffering alongside his chosen human sufferers. The call for mere submission, then, is as crass as Islamic theocracy.
The bully that flaunts his strength and revels in the submission of lesser creatures is, of course, just a monster whom every decent person has the moral obligation not to worship but to shun or to resist, however hopeless that struggle may be.
But Muslims locked themselves into this topsy-turvy morality tale by the accident of their historical success as conquerors. Promoters of Jewish monotheism had no business usurping God’s agency by establishing theocracies with mere human hands and metal weapons. God was supposed to impose his rule by supernatural means at the end of history.
By jumping the gun, perhaps having grown restless with the angst that’s implicit in Jewish monotheism, Muslims had to retcon Jewish theology. God’s function was no longer to exacerbate Jewish brooding, but to universalize the Muslim experience in which the weak fell before the strong. The hidden/ostracized God of losers became the divine guarantor of winners.
This political reinvention of monotheism was backed by an environmental one, as I argue elsewhere, since the desert conditions of the Muslim world could only have given the Sun prominence in the Muslim’s imagination. Allah wasn’t just the mascot of conquerors and dominators, but the indifferent, almighty purifier. Allah would cleanse the land as the Sun bakes the desert. And Allah had a merciful side only because there are oases in the wasteland.
True, Muslims had to sacrifice some of their earthly pleasures, so they were hardly naturalistic to the point of being libertines. But Islamic sacrifice wasn’t as consistent, say, as the Jain’s or the Buddhist’s since Muslims were enjoined to take up the sword in defense of their faith. At least in what Westerners call the medieval period, Muslims had to excel in combat, if not in partying.
That, then, is a snapshot of monotheism. Beginning, roughly, with Jewish alienation from humanity and from nature, the story passes through the Christian muddying of the waters, into polytheistic and pagan excuses for medieval Christian totalitarianism and ending with Islam’s pseudo-revival of Jewish concerns that modifies the Jewish dramatization of God so the deity could serve still as a cheerleader for imperialists.
Christianity and Islam offered different apologies for imperial politics, namely Roman and Arab ones. You have legalistic obfuscations on the one hand, Roman infrastructure having replaced Judaism’s useless code of laws, and on the other you had the mystical, Viking-like ravings of Muslims who were drunk on power they earned for themselves, and whose grimness was instilled by the desert Sun.
