How, then, did Muhammad negotiate Ethelbert's dilemma?
His words and
promises were fair indeed, but how could the pagans of Arabia adopt
them without abandoning the age-old beliefs of the whole Arab people?
Here we have to go back to the oldest monotheist scripture, the Bible.
This substantial book speaks at length of many things, but it never so
much as mentions such worthy peoples as the English, the Irish, or the
Pomeranians. Yet it has something quite significant to say about the
Arabs, especially if one knows (as everybody did at the time of the
rise of Islam) that when God speaks of the Ishmaelites, it is the Arabs
to whom he is referring. They were called Ishmaelites because according
to Biblical genealogy they descended from Ishmael, a son of the
patriarch Abraham—unlike the Israelites, who descended from a different
son of Abraham, namely Isaac. The question, as often in such
situations, was which son would get what, and the answer was provided
by God in a conversation with Abraham. He promised to bless Ishmael,
and to make of his descendants "a great nation"; but, he insisted, "my
covenant I will establish with Isaac" (Genesis 17:20-21). The Arabs
were therefore a sideline, albeit a relatively favored one. Thus far
the Bible.
Many centuries later Islam told the same story, but
told it
differently. In the Koran we read of Abraham and Ishmael building God a
house; the Bible makes no mention of this house, but Muslim tradition
identifies it as the Ka`ba in Mecca. As they work, they pray to God to
make of their seed a nation submissive (muslim) to him, and eventually
to send among them "a messenger, one of themselves," to instruct them
and purify them (Koran 2:127-29). The Arabs, then, were destined to be
more than just a great nation. The Ka`ba, though it had come to look
like a pagan sanctuary, had originated as a monotheist temple; no
wonder Islam had no problem retaining the pre-Islamic pilgrimage to
Mecca in an Islamized form. It was as if the English could have
sanctified a pagan temple in Canterbury as an Abrahamic foundation. At
the same time Muhammad was manifestly the prophet for whom Abraham had
prayed, and an Arab like the people to whom he was sent.
The English owed their evangelization to a monk from
Rome, while the
Irish Americans who march in New York on Saint Patrick's Day celebrate
the conversion of their ancestors at the hands of a British slave.
Muhammad, by contrast, was an Arab, and sent with an "Arabic Koran"
(Koran 12:2). In short, adopting Islam did not mean abandoning the age-
old beliefs of the whole Arab people; all that had to be discarded was
the pagan overlay that had come to obscure the pristine monotheism of
their ancestors. For an Arab, to convert to Islam was to be true to
oneself.
