Fight in the Way of God 103nation in the world” (2:47), when he raged against the Christians for
abandoning their faith and confounding the truth of their scriptures,
when he complained that both groups “no longer follow the teachings
of the Torah and the Gospel, and what has been revealed to them by
their Lord” (5:66), he was merely following in the footsteps of the
prophets who had come before him. He was, in other words, Isaiah
calling his fellow Jews “a sinful nation, a people laden with iniquity,
offspring of evildoers” (Isaiah 1:4); he was John the Baptist lashing out
against “the brood of vipers” who assumed that their status as “sons of
Abraham” would keep them safe from judgment (Luke 3:7–8); he was
Jesus promising damnation for the hypocrites who “for the sake of
tradition, have made void the word of God” (Matthew 15:6). After all,
isn’t this exactly the message a prophet is supposed to deliver?
It is no coincidence that just as they reversed many of Muhammad’s
social reforms aimed at empowering women, the Muslim scriptural
and legal scholars of the following centuries rejected the notion that
Jews and Christians were part of the Ummah, and instead designated
both groups as unbelievers. These scholars reinterpreted the Revela-
tion to declare that the Quran had superseded, rather than supple-
mented, the Torah and the Gospels, and called on Muslims to
distinguish themselves from the People of the Book. This was largely
an attempt to differentiate the nascent religion of Islam from other
communities so it could establish its own religious independence,
much as the early Christians gradually dissociated themselves from
the Jewish practices and rituals that had given birth to their move-
ment by demonizing the Jews as the killers of Jesus.
Nevertheless, the actions of these scriptural scholars were in
direct defiance of Muhammad’s example and the teachings of the
Quran. For even though Muhammad recognized the irreconcilable
differences that existed among the Peoples of the Book, he never
called for a partitioning of the faiths. On the contrary, to those Jews
who say “the Christians are wrong!” and to those Christians who say
“the Jews are wrong!” (2:113), and to both groups who claim that “no
one will go to heaven except the Jews and Christians” (2:111),
Muhammad offered a compromise. “Let us come to an agreement on
the things we hold in common,” the Quran suggests: “that we worship