engleski

Why Western Orientalists Claim that Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

This work presents an introduction to the author’s thesis that contemporary western mainstream Orientalism is often more concerned with presenting an apologetic picture of Islam, ad hoc designed to serve current ideological and political trends and needs, than with serving as academic discipline in which scholarly methods of research and customary critical approach to sources are applied. Due to an understandable and legitimate desire to reduce the increasingly intense conflict with parts of the Islamic world, official policy in the West has staunchly supported the Orientalists’ presentation of Islam as a religion which is fully compatible with the tenets of Judeo-Christianity. Consequently, the most visible contemporary scholars of Islam are those upholding and promoting this position in their studies. Several common elements can be distinguished in those Orientalists’ approach. One is selectively disregarding individual features of Islam and the Prophet Muhammad’s career, which are likely to be deemed deplorable by many western readers. Another is the uncritical acceptance of Islamic sacred traditional narratives and a lack of objective scholarly examination of their historicity. The main topic of this article, however, is the Orientalists’ frequent introductory argument in favor of the fundamental compatibility between Islam and Christianity, inasmuch as the Muslims worship the same God as Christians. Notwithstanding the fact that “the same God” theory is the reverberation of Islamic dogma found in the Koran 29:46, and that the Biblical and Christian position on the issue is rarely discussed by the Orientalists who promulgate it, the latter regularly present it not as Islamic creed, but as their own scholarly expert opinion, or even as a matter of common knowledge. The resulting peculiarity – religious instruction classified as objective scholarship and promoted by academia – even if carried out with the noble intention of reducing mistrust and clashes between the two civilizations, in the author’s view turns the wheel of progress of the western science in reverse.

Western Orientalism; Islam; Christianity; history; historicity; apology; dogma; tradition; comparative religion; methods of research

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