100 No god but God
Christians, and Muslims shared a single divine scripture but also that
they constituted a single divine Ummah. As far as Muhammad was
concerned, the Jews and the Christians were “People of the Book”
(ahl al-Kitab), spiritual cousins who, as opposed to the pagans and
polytheists of Arabia, worshipped the same God, read the same scrip-
tures, and shared the same moral values as his Muslim community.
Although each faith comprised its own distinct religious community
(its own individual Ummah), together they formed one united Ummah,
an extraordinary idea that Mohammed Bamyeh calls “monotheistic
pluralism.” Thus, the Quran promises that “all those who believe—
the Jews, the Sabians, the Christians—anyone who believes in God and
the Last Days, and who does good deeds, will have nothing to fear or
regret” (5:69; emphasis added).
It was this conviction of the existence of a unified, monotheistic
Ummah that led Muhammad to connect his community to the Jews,
not that he felt the need to emulate the Jewish clans, nor that he
wanted to facilitate their acceptance of him as a prophet. Muhammad
aligned his community with the Jews in Medina because he consid-
ered them, as well as the Christians, to be part of his Ummah. Conse-
quently, when he came to Medina, he made Jerusalem—the site of the
Temple (long since destroyed) and the direction in which the Dias-
pora Jews turned during worship—the direction of prayer, or qiblah,
for all Muslims. He imposed a mandatory fast upon his community,
which was to take place annually on the tenth day (Ashura) of the first
month of the Jewish calendar, the day more commonly known as Yom
Kippur. He purposely set the day of Muslim congregation at noon on
Friday so that it would coincide with, but not disrupt, Jewish prepara-
tions for the Sabbath. He adopted many of the Jewish dietary laws and
purity requirements, and encouraged his followers to marry Jews, as
he himself did (5:5–7).
And while it is true that after a few years, Muhammad both
changed the qiblah from Jerusalem to Mecca, and set the annual fast at
Ramadan (the month in which the Quran was first revealed) instead of
Yom Kippur, these decisions should not be interpreted as “a break
with the Jews,” but as the maturing of Islam into its own independent
religion. Despite the changes, Muhammad continued to encourage
his followers to fast on Yom Kippur, and he never ceased to venerate