Issa ibn Maryam  (Jesus of Mary)

Jesus according to the Koran

Despite the political hegemony of Western Christianity, throughout the world various cultures have also embraced Jesus Christ and imagined him in different ways.

In Islam, the figures of Christ and his mother Mary appear endearingly in the Quran, where a whole chapter is named after her. But their presence in the Islamic culture goes beyond their mention in the Quran.

They figure prominently in Islamic literature (in Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Urdu, etc), as Palestinian historian Tarif al-Khalidi demonstrated in his seminal work The Muslim Jesus: Sayings and Stories in Islamic Literature (2001). Khalidi brought to the English-speaking world a wealth of information about the centrality of the figure of Christ in Muslim literary and poetic imagination, as well as in Islamic doctrinal debates and disputations. 

Khalidi's emphasis was the distinction between the Quranic Jesus and the Jesus that emerged in particular in the mystical tradition of Islam as a patron prophet of the ascetics. That distinction marks the space between the Quranic revelation and the long history of various peoples historically cultivating love and affection for a prophet they considered their own. 

As Khalidi's text shows the Muslim Christ is a central figure in a multiplicity of hermeneutic contexts different from the Christian context. Here Jesus becomes a figure of mystical reunion with divinity quite different from a theological premise of the Trinity.  

In a beautiful Qasideh of the Persian poet and philosopher Naser Khosrow (1004-1088) we read: 

When you have sword in your hand you should not murder people,

God will never forget evil deed

Jesus once saw a person murdered on his path

He wondered and he asked:

Whom did you kill so that you were killed in return?

And who shall kill the man who thus murdered thee? 

Don't harass people tapping on their door with your finger,

So no one would bother you banging on your door with his fist! 

Such references to Jesus Christ abound in Muslim sources in multiple languages. To poets and philosophers like Naser Khosrow, mystics like Rumi and Ibn Arabi, Christ was not an alien figure. He was one of their own. 

The rise of the figure of Christ in the immediate historical vicinity of millions of Arab and Iranian Christians of various denominations, poses the inevitable question of the interface between the figure of Christ in the Gospels and in Islamic sources, as what some have called "the Fifth Gospel" - for if we collect all the references to Christ in poetic, literary, mystical and philosophical Islamic contexts, we will have a solidly Islamic Jesus.