Free Peace Be Upon You by Zachary Karabell Page B

with the emerging Sufis and the ever-present Shi’ites—not only deepened over time, but became hydraheaded. Each one produced its own sects and splinter groups, until centuries later, Islam was as fragmented and varied as Christianity with its many sects and offshoots. The early fissures within the Muslim community are a guide to how Islam evolved in much the same way as the debates among the Founding Fathers in the United States are crucial to understanding the American soul.
    These divides also shaped how Muslims related to the People of the Book. The rationalist approach that found favor at the Abbasid court welcomed discourse with Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and many others. The dialogue between Timothy and al-Mahdi was repeated nearly fifty years later, when the caliph al-Ma’mun invitedTheodore Abu Qurra, a Greek Orthodox bishop from Syria, to the court. Much like Timothy years before, Abu Qurra stood before the caliph to defend Christian theology. Al-Ma’mun, in turn, tried to expose what he saw as the inconsistencies of the Christian faith. Abu Qurra had written extensively about the competing religions of the Near East, and he had concluded that only Christians could lay claim to possessing the one true religion.
    Rather than simply asserting the truth of the gospel, Abu Qurra used analogies, hypotheticals, and parables to prove his point. “Let’s say that I grew up on a mountain ignorant of the nature of people,” he wrote in one treatise, “and one day… I went down to the cities and to the society of people, and I perceived them to be of different religions.” He would have noticed that most religions forbid some things and permitted others, and most “claimed to have a god.” How then could he tell which was true? Well, God, in his wisdom, would have sent a messenger to inform people of the truth. But that person who came down from the mountain would also notice that different people had claimed to be messengers and put forth a set of teachings. How then to separate the wheat from the chaff? By studying each tradition, Abu Qurra claimed that he could identify inconsistencies and weaknesses in all of them except for the gospel.
    Like Abu Qurra, Muslim scholars dissected competing scriptures, and the rationalists delighted in analyzing the Torah and the gospel to find errors of logic. Both sides could be mean-spirited. Abu Qurra frequently disparaged Muslims in subtle ways, calling them “those who claim to have a book sent down to them by God.” Muslims responded by ridiculing the inconsistencies in the New Testament. They also excoriated the idea of virgin birth and the Trinity as inherently illogical and hence proof that Christianity was not the true religion. From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, what is most striking about these debates is not just that they took place, but that such a premium was placed on logic rather than faith. An elite group of Muslims and Christians in the Abbasid ninth century relied on reason and philosophy, not personal piety or the strength of belief, in order to demonstrate the truth of their religions. 3
    What also stands out is how much common ground there was, not just between the philosophers, caliphs, and theologians, but between Sufis and Christian and Jewish hermits and monks. Those ascetics who recoiled from the imperial opulence that accompanied empire looked atthe life of Muhammad and saw a man and a society characterized by piety uncluttered by materialism. Like the Jewish Essenes at the time of Christ and the Desert Fathers of Egypt in the fourth century, they were disgusted by the finery of the court, and they viewed the elaborate theological debates and the exquisite complexity of Greek philosophy as signs of decadence. Rather than fight to change the system, they retreated from the material world. These early ascetics were the precursors to the more organized Sufi movements of later centuries. They believed that the