Our friend CHARLIE DANIELS likes to talk about what a devout Christian he is. But he's not really into all this ecumenical nonsense you hear talk about. Chuckie's Soapbox column of 09/02/03, "Not the Same" is about Islam versus the True Religion (Chuckie's version of Christianity). Chuckie says, well, heck, the Christian God's name is Jehovah, and them there Muslims call their god Allah. So they obviously ain't the same!
This is all silliness, of course. Jehovah is an English translation of the Hebrew name for God in the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), more commonly rendered now as Yahweh. "Allah" is just the Arabic word for God. The Hebrew Bible uses other names for God, too, such as El Shaddai and Adonai.
Yes, Islam borrowed elements of pre-Mohammedan "pagan" religion. But so did Judaism borrow from Canaanite, Egyptian and Babylonian religious ideas. Just as Christianity was later influenced in various way by Greek philosophy and other religions with which it came into contact and competed.
Chuckie illustrates his theological depth by asking, "Why do the Arabs hate the Jews?" And answers by explaining that Abraham's son Ishmael was banished from Abraham's household, a biblical story which he evidently reads quite literally as history. "Ishmael became the father of the Arabs and [Abraham's other son] Jacob became the father of the Jews and the enmity has existed every since."
The irony of this explanation is entirely lost on Chuckie, I'm sure. But in crudely identifying Arabs with Islam and tracing their history back to Abraham and Ishmael, he is closer to conservative Muslim claims about the origins of their religion than to most modern Christian readings, not to speak of secular historians.
But Chuckie, promoting hostility between Muslims and Christians, can't admit the common origins of the three "Abrahamic" religious traditions. Actually, the ideas of Jewish Christian communities may have influenced Mohammed's religious ideas. Anyone who reads the Koran can see the influence of the Hebrew scriptures.
Instead, Chuckie promotes a crudely ethnic and unhistorical notion of the present-day hostilities between many Arabs and Jews, and specifically between Israel and its Arab neighbors, that is offensive to good sense and to any kind of honest Christianity.
- Bruce Miller
Hearing: Jackson Browne, "Casino Nation"
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