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God,” and if these unbelievers “persist in what they are saying, a painful
punishment will afflict those of them who persist.” Once more empha-
sizing this point, the sura continues that “the Messiah, son of Mary, was
only a messenger; other messengers had come and gone before him; his
mother was a virtuous woman; both ate food [like other mortals]. See
how clear We make these signs for them; see how deluded they are” (Q.
5:73– 75). Scholars have enumerated five aspects of christianity rejected
by the Qurʾan: Jesus and Mary as gods, man as a “son” of God, trithe-
ism, complete identity between Jesus and God, and al-masīḥ (the mes-
siah, i.e., christ) being independent of God.^122 While the Qurʾan does
offer a certain degree of praise of Jesus and christianity in its imagined
precorrupted form, later medieval Muslim perceptions of christianity
were more uniformly unsympathetic. Medieval Muslims, according to
Jacques Waardenburg, “identified christianity as a religion opposed to
Islam as a religion; the truths of these two religions were thought to be
mutually exclusive.”^123 Muslim polemicists attacked christianity for the
latter’s forgery of scripture, its errors of thought and doctrine (including
the notions of incarnation, the trinity, and original sin), and its faults in
religious practice (especially for its alleged idol worship and its laxity in
circumcision and other aspects of ritual purity).^124
Muslim anti- christian writings, moreover, did not cease in the
medieval period. They continued into al- Khalidi’s own day, and not
exclusively among the religiously conservative. Such prominent late
nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Muslim thinkers as the re-
former Muhammad ʿAbduh (whose notion of evolving ijmāʿ was dis-
cussed above) and his younger, more politically oriented collaborator
Muhammad Rashid Rida— both contemporaries and acquaintances of
al- Khalidi— wrote extensively on and against christianity. ʿAbduh’s
al-Islāmwa-n-naṣrāniyyamaʿal-ʿilmwa-l-madaniyya (Islam and chris-
tianity with [reference to] Science and civilization) challenged the
purported rationality of christianity (in contrast to Islam’s alleged ir-
rationality), and Rida’s Shubuhātan-naṣārāwa-ḥujajal-islām(The Spe-
cious Arguments of the christians [against Islam] and the Proofs of
Islam) set out to highlight the polytheistic contaminations of christian-
ity.^125 Al- Khalidi’s apparent desire to see the unity of Islam and chris-
tianity is thus most remarkable as it is at odds with a long history of
opposition. On the fundamental religious issues, al- Khalidi’s comment
suggests, christians and Muslims are in accord, in contrast to Jews.
(^122) See Waardenburg, MuslimPerceptionsofOtherReligions, 9.
(^123) Ibid., 40.
(^124) Ibid., 49– 51.
(^125) See ibid., 77– 79.