Could you tell me why muslims think Jesus was a prophet and why not the son of God as Christians believe? Why we believe that he was a prophet and not a God. Alright, please sit down. There’s so many reasons why. In fact as a general principle when you look at the world religions as they are seen today we notice that the concept of Godhood having appeared in person is present always in every region of the world. No region of the world is devoid of such a concept and Christianity is just one example among so many cases.
So it’s impossible for God to appear himself as personification in every region of the world and keep it secret from the other regions. When he bestows himself for instance or personifies himself in the form of Jesus as his son he doesn’t let it be known to the Indians or Chinese or other people of other regions who also have the same visitation from God as if God had appeared to them in person himself. For instance Krishna is supposed to be a God who visited the earth in the form of a man and there’s so many other so-called gods or sons of gods or manifestations of gods who appeared everywhere and if they were all true gods that is the question then they should have told each other every people of every region that we appeared as Krishna there and we appeared as so and so there and so and so there and now we have appeared before you as Christ or somebody else.
But no such reference ever made anywhere. So we can safely infer that all that is human imagination, creation of human mind. But another phenomena we do observe is the phenomena of prophethood which has a common factor everywhere. We find people as claiming to be messengers of God again in every region and their fundamental claim is the same. They have the same claim that God does speak to people and does come into contact with his own servants and gives a message or a religion to certain people. This has universality, this concept about it. That is the second general observation I make on this.
The third general observation is that whenever somebody appears as a prophet there is a general tendency among the people that when that prophet is dead out of extreme love for him they begin to raise his status from manhood to something beyond man, as superman or something even beyond. They generally tend to turn him into a god. This is, this tendency in human nature is again a universal tendency, there is no exception. This tendency is not only observed in the religious world but also in the other world. That is to say national heroes, they are turned into demigods later on.
Every hero in every respect whom a certain people get attached to is gradually elevated from his real position to something of a mythical position. So this is why hero and hero worship has ultimately ended into man-made stories and legends like Robin Hood for instance in England, like King Arthur and his court and Sir Lancelot. All these although we know were ordinary human figures they might have achieved some feats, some heroic feats, but everybody agrees that the legends woven around them are not real, they are fiction more than reality. Some reality of course is found in the central core but most of the stories built around them is fiction.
So it is the same tendency in our human nature which is responsible for in religion to lift the status of prophets from ordinary human beings into something beyond humanity. And that something like that must have happened to Jesus Christ peace be upon him. Because otherwise you do not understand this general phenomena of finding God in God in different forms in different regions of the world or sons and daughters and children of God. In fact it is not the only solitary incident in the religious history that you have come across that is claim of somebody or attributed claim to him to sonhood. The reality is that so many sons and daughters of God are found everywhere in the world.
Even in Arabia where the Prophet of Islam appeared. The Arabs of his time used to attribute daughters to Allah. So if one son of one particular nation having appeared in Palestine for instance is to be accepted in total as such, why not those daughters? What is the fault of those poor daughters? I mean their equality of man and woman would not come into picture. It is, I mean there is no reason why we should accept the claim of one people as against the other. As far as the miracles are concerned that is one, I mean one region where the Christian fathers claim that they have some proof of his supernatural powers. And they pronounce this very much. But the fact is, where is the proof?
A claim is not a proof. All they have is a claim or a chain of claims. Because even the authenticity of the scriptures as having been dated back to the time of Jesus Christ is debatable. The researchers are still working on it and we don’t know whether whatever was said by St. John was really true. So when even the reports about Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, by his own followers, he knows disciples or so-called disciples, are not trustworthy entirely from the historical point of view. How can you claim that those miracles which were attributed to Jesus Christ were real miracles as did happen? Now if you claim, where is the evidence? The only evidence is found in some narrations reported by his own followers.
That is no claim. In fact if such things had happened actually during the lifetime of Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, then the opponents must have got convinced because that was very extraordinary. Some of those miracles were so extraordinary as if others had really witnessed those miracles then they should have accepted him in total and the stories must have spread far and wide. But for the time being, let us consider that if those claims made about his miracles are true, then what is his position? I mean that is a supposition. Now I turn again to the other regions of the world.
The claims made about Krishna and other so-called gods in other regions of the world are not only similar in nature, even greater, even much greater in fact. Not to mention the great figures who are attributed God’s characteristics or attributes, we find this phenomena even in the Muslim world where they don’t believe in human beings representing God as personifications. So everywhere in the world, taller claims are made than the claims made by Christianity about miracles performed by their so-called gods. Even lesser people than so-called gods have been attributed miracles of stupendous nature.
So if you put miracle against miracle, even then Jesus’s claim collapses because the principle has to be set first. The principle in this case would be that because there is no evidence, I mean positive, definite evidence which can be proved in a court of law, so we must accept any people’s claim. Whatever they say, we accept it because they are the custodians of their history. You accept this claim, this principle and then apply this principle to Christianity and other religions, so that should be applied equally to everyone. If that be so, then this is my argument, if that be so, then the claims to greater miracles are made in other regions of the world as well, so how would you treat them?
So if you in principle accept their claims, then Jesus is not the only person to be accepted as son of God, then there would be so many others who would enter the race and whose claims will have to be accepted, otherwise it would be unjust to them to reject their claim without reason and accept somebody else’s claim again without reason. So from the so-called miracles, you can’t establish anything. Again, as I told you, lesser men than claimants to Godhood have been attributed such miracles as are similar to the nature as attributed to Jesus Christ peace be upon him.
So what does it prove? For instance, in the Muslim world, where the unity of God is so much stressed and idolatry is so much condemned and we believe only in one and the only one God, yet ordinary human beings, saints in Islam, have been attributed such preposterous claims that if you accept them, then they have a better right to be accepted as sons of God. For instance, Sayyid Abdul Qadir Jilani is one of the saints in Islam. About him, it is said, and his followers believe in that. And this is a recent claim, much more recent claim than the claim of Jesus Christ peace be upon him, and more authentic reporting has been done in this case. We know positively that these claims were made by his close associates and followers, not by those who appeared a hundred years later. His claims were committed to writing much earlier than the claims of Jesus, or not of Jesus Christ, but about Jesus Christ were recorded.
They were recorded a hundred years or more after his crucifixion. So I’ll quote one claim of the followers of Sayyid Abdul Qadir Jilani to establish my point, to help you understand this phenomenon. His followers claim that once he was crossing a river by boat, there he observed an old lady who came to the banks and started wailing. And she wailed in such agony, and there was so much pathos in her wailing that the attraction of the saint was drawn towards her. When she asked why she was in such misery and pain, the lady said, she was an old lady, quite advanced in age, she said that sixteen years ago, my son, who was just going across the river with his, you know, marriage procession, he was going across the river to bring his bridegroom, his bride, this was the bridegroom, so he was going to cross the river to fetch her bride from the other village, across the river, and the marriage party was all along travelling with him.
And right in the middle of the river, the boat capsized, and all of them drowned. And he was the only son she had. So since then, she told him, it is his custom, her custom, to visit that river, that bank, every morning at that time, and to wail for the terrible loss of her son to her. So when he heard this story, he said, all right, I’ll see to it that your son is returned to you. So he looked for the angel responsible for death, who is called Israel, and at that time it was reported to him that he was taking all the souls which he had proscribed on earth to present to God, and he was ascending to heaven to present those souls to him.
So this saint, Hazrat Abdul Qadir Jilani, is told to have ascended to heaven in pursuit of Israel. Before he could reach heaven and present the souls to God, he caught him halfway, and told him to release the souls of not only the son, but of all his companions and the marriage party. So he said, it is against the rules. Allah has established the rule that whoever dies will never be returned to earth. He said, what about, to help with your rules and things, I order you to return that soul. So he said, no, I can’t do it. He said, I’ll see to it. So he grabbed him by the throat and said, would you return or shall I draw your soul out? So poor thing was so compelled by this saint, and so threatened, that if he didn’t return these souls as demanded, he would capture all the souls he was carrying and liberate them.
And he will see to it that all return to their respective homes in the land. So he was so frightened, Israel, that he had to release the souls of all the marriage party. And then he returned with them, and suddenly the board reappeared from underneath. And the entire marriage party was as if they were just fresh, they were going across the river. Now this is a miracle. Can you find any parallel to this in Bible, in the New Testament? Anything as fantastic and as impossible as this? You can’t. So why do you reject this? No reason why. There’s good people, pious people who have reported this.
As pious as the people earlier. This is a thing of recent history, that is a thing of remote history. Here these stories were compiled by those who were really the companions of the saint. While in the case of Jesus Christ, either they were not compiled by the true companions, but in fact by some of those who had never seen him. For instance, St. John, St. Paul, they had never seen Jesus Christ, peace be upon him, only in visions they had seen him. And in some cases, and in all cases, they were recorded much after the fact of crucifixion. But in this case of the Muslim saint, all these matters were recorded in the lifetime of his companions.
So there is no actual reason why you should accept one as against the other. So if you begin to accept these tall claims about such miracles, then the entire world will be teeming with miracles. And it will be impossible for you to accept a few and reject others. So there is no logic in that. The true logic is in the phenomena, general principle, that if there is a God, and there is a God we believe, then he must send prophets, his messengers, from among men, who are like others, who deliver the message to them and set an example, establish a model for them. This is the phenomena of prophethood. And because we know, as I have already established, that out of the tendency of hero-worship in human beings, people tend to raise the status of their respective prophets.
So this is why we observe this elevated status in every religion, everywhere in the world. So this must have happened, we believe, to Jesus Christ as well. This is why we believe in him as a prophet, not as a son of God. And we consider it is unjust to him to have raised his status because he himself was a humble man.
All his life he suffered for the sake of establishing what he called Father, that is God, the only God. To establish his respect, his honour and his unity, that is what he worked for. So if you raise his own status, elevate his own status to that of Godhood, that would be unjust to his own message. Do you understand what we believe and why we believe now?
